Berkshire Knitting Mills and Wyomissing Industries: The Factory Borough
Near Reading, Pennsylvania
Just west of Reading, sharing a border with the city but governed separately, sits the borough of Wyomissing, and its story is almost a mirror image of Reading's: an industrial success that managed its transition better than its larger neighbor. The two communities grew up together, but they took different paths through the twentieth century.
Wyomissing came into being in the eighteen nineties when a Reading lumber dealer named Thomas Merritt assembled six hundred acres of land and a group of investors began planning a model industrial suburb. Three German-American businessmen, Ferdinand Thun, Henry Janssen, and Gustav Oberlaender, became the driving forces behind what they called Wyomissing Industries, a set of interconnected manufacturing enterprises that included the Narrow Fabric Company, the Textile Machine Works, and the Berkshire Knitting Mills.
Berkshire Knitting Mills, which produced women's hosiery, became one of the largest textile operations in Pennsylvania. It eventually grew into Berkshire International, and the name Berkshire survived in the retail trade for decades after the manufacturing moved on.
Wyomissing incorporated as a borough in nineteen six, and the founders built it according to the progressive principles of the planned industrial suburb: worker housing, green space, community institutions. The planned community aspect was always somewhat idealized, as these things tend to be, but the physical infrastructure they created outlasted the manufacturing that paid for it.
The detailed labor history of Berkshire Knitting Mills, including working conditions and union organizing in the early decades, is incompletely documented in publicly available sources. What is clear is that the mills provided steady employment for thousands of Reading-area workers through the first half of the twentieth century before the textile industry's long contraction reached this valley too.
