The Kirwan Heights Industrial District
Brick, staybolts, vanadium, glass, and specialty steel on the PRR Chartiers Branch · October 2026
Across Chartiers Creek from Bridgeville, in southern Collier Township, one man’s land deal turned a hillside beside the Pennsylvania Railroad into an industrial park. From about 1910 into the 1950s the Kirwan Heights plants employed several thousand people from the surrounding towns, and every one of them shipped and received by rail on the PRR’s Chartiers Branch.
This page retells the history from John F. Oyler’s November 2018 column, “Kirwan Heights Industrial District explored,” which grew out of a talk he gave to the Collier Township Historical Society. The Bridgeville Area Historical Society publishes a longer version of the same piece. Both are listed under Sources.
Related pages: POHC line industries, McKees Rocks to Washington · Railroads of the Chartiers Valley · Photos (Flannery Bolt advertisements)
C. P. Mayer’s hillside
Casper Peter Mayer came to Bridgeville in 1879 and worked his way up to superintendent of the Bridgeville Mine. He opened a general store in 1886 and bought a lumber company about six years later. Around 1900 he bought a large tract across the creek. Its value was its location: flat land beside the Pennsylvania Railroad, with a shale hillside behind it.
Mayer did not try to run every business himself. He found tenants, and one after another they built plants along the railroad.
The plants
| Company | Started | Product | What became of it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mayer Brick Company | 1903 | Paving blocks and face brick from the hillside shale | Ran well into the 1950s |
| Flannery Bolt Company | 1904 | Staybolts for locomotive boilers | Wartime machine-gun barrels; Army-Navy “E” Award |
| American Vanadium Company | 1906 | Ferrovanadium from Peruvian ore | Sold to American Vanadium Corporation, 1919 |
| J. B. Higbee Glass Company | c. 1907 | Pressed-glass tableware | General Electric lamp glass until 2017 |
| Universal Rolling Mill Company | 1908 (rolling 1909) | Sheet, then specialty steel | Universal-Cyclops, later Universal Stainless & Alloy |
Mayer Brick Company (1903)
Mayer’s own company came first, organized in 1903 to dig the shale on the hillside. At full output the yard could turn out 20,000 paving blocks or 30,000 face bricks a day. Its pavers, stamped with the company name and “Bridgeville, Pa.,” still turn up wherever old brick is collected. The yard kept going well into the 1950s.
Flannery Bolt Company (1904)
Brothers James and Joseph Flannery incorporated the bolt company in 1904 around the Tate patent for a flexible staybolt, the fastener that holds a locomotive firebox to its outer boiler shell. Their design, made of vanadium steel, quickly took a large share of a big market: every steam locomotive needed hundreds of staybolts. During World War II the plant made machine-gun barrels and earned one of the first Army-Navy “E” Awards.
The archive has Flannery’s trade advertisements, including one for the staybolts in the Baltimore & Ohio’s 2-8-8-4 locomotives.
American Vanadium Company (1906)
Joseph Flannery saw that the bolt business depended on vanadium, so in 1906 the brothers went into vanadium themselves. They bought a mine at Minas Ragra in Peru, shipped the ore to a new plant next to the bolt works, and refined it into ferrovanadium for alloy steel. When they sold it to the American Vanadium Corporation in 1919, Oyler writes, it was the largest vanadium producer in the world.
J. B. Higbee Glass Company
The Higbee family’s earlier firm, Bryce, Higbee & Company of Homestead, went bankrupt. Orlando “Ollie” Higbee bought its most valuable assets, the pattern designs, and built a new glass works at Kirwan Heights. Higbee sold affordable pressed-glass tableware, usually bringing out a new pattern each year with several dozen pieces in it, under a bumblebee trademark.
After Ollie Higbee died in 1919, General Electric bought the plant and turned it to lighting: bulbs, tubing, and fluorescent tubes. Sources differ on whether GE took over in 1918 or 1919. The “Glass House” ran until GE closed it in 2017.
Universal Rolling Mill Company (1908)
Universal was incorporated in 1908 with used equipment bought from the Waynesburg Forge, Sheet, and Tin Mills. Walter Baker, who had been superintendent at Waynesburg, ran the new mill, and it began rolling in 1909. By 1918 its business was specialty steel, and it renamed itself the Universal Steel Company. In 1936 it merged with Cyclops of Titusville to form Universal-Cyclops. After a short spell under Armco in the early 1990s, an employee group bought the plant as Universal Stainless & Alloy. Of all the Kirwan Heights plants, it lasted longest.
Why it matters to HART
Kirwan Heights is the kind of place the Chartiers Valley lines were built to serve: several unrelated plants, each with its own inbound raw material and outbound product, lined up on one stretch of railroad. Shale went out as brick, Peruvian ore came in and left as ferrovanadium, and glass, bolts, and steel sheet were all shipped from the same sidings. Neville Island, a few miles down the valley, worked the same way. The POHC line industries page follows the rest of the line south to Canonsburg and Washington.
Sources
- John F. Oyler, “Kirwan Heights Industrial District explored,” newspaper column, 1 November 2018; PDF hosted by Collier Township. https://colliertownship.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Kirwan-Heights-History_201811080720099575.pdf
- Bridgeville Area Historical Society, “The Kirwan Heights Industrial District” (posted 1 November 2018, updated 4 April 2020; the same talk with more on Mayer, the Flannerys, and Higbee). https://bridgevillehistory.org/the-kirwan-heights-industrial-district/
- HART, POHC line industries, McKees Rocks to Washington, for GE’s 1918 purchase date and the later Universal Stainless history, with its own sources.