Reading Hardware Company

Brick and reinforced concrete factory buildings at the southwest corner of Sixth and Willow Streets in Reading form the surviving core of a hardware manufacturing complex. The works grew from a blacksmith shop opened in 1851 and became the Reading Hardware Company in 1862. After a fire in July 1888 destroyed much of the plant, the company rebuilt, and by 1925 it employed about 1,500 workers on five acres and supplied hardware to buildings including the White House. The seven-story Building No. 11, completed in 1923 and designed by the Ballinger Company, is regarded as an outstanding example of reinforced concrete factory design. Its vertical production process, with raw materials entering at ground level and finished goods leaving the same way, is a notable industrial layout. The surviving buildings, with their monumental scale and boiler house stack, also preserve a record of hardware manufacturing from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century.