Sylvania Electric — Girls Town USA
Pennsylvania
The building you are passing once hummed with a wartime secret. Sylvania Electric Products operated a factory in Emporium that became one of World War Two's most vital industrial sites. Workers here produced vacuum tubes for proximity fuzes, the precision detonators that transformed artillery from guesswork into a guided science. A shell fitted with a proximity fuze could sense a target's distance and detonate at exactly the right moment, dramatically increasing accuracy.
What made Emporium's factory especially notable was who built those fuzes. The workforce was composed primarily of women. Their numbers and their skill were so striking that Collier's magazine christened Emporium Girls Town USA, a nickname that stuck through the war years.
The factory operated on Poplar Street until nineteen ninety. The former Sylvania Club, where you are now, was once the home of Henry Auchu, a lumber baron who was among the company's original investors. Industry, timber, and the determination of wartime women all converged in this small Cameron County town.
