Mount Penn’s western face was reshaped between the 1890s and mid-1920s by three distinct quarry operations whose scars created the notorious “white spot” visible from downtown Reading. Contemporary aerials (September 1922; August 1929) show wide, stair-stepped benches running from today’s Hillside Playground up toward the Buttonwood Street Reservoir and, by the decade’s end, extending north toward the then-new Reading Senior High School. These terraces were largely the work of two mid-mountain pits above North 14th and West Green Streets—while a third, smaller cut at the mountain’s southern tip (the Witman tract) later became the site of the Pagoda.
1922 Aerial View
1929 Aerial View
1) The Witman Quarry (southern tip / Pagoda site)
In the late 1890s, brothers John A. Witman and William Abbott Witman, Sr. purchased roughly ten acres on Mount Penn’s southern point and began removing “white hill stone.” In 1900 William promoted a vision for a mountaintop sanitarium to be built of his own quarry’s material—an early signal that the venture aimed to supply Reading’s building boom with locally cut stone. Public reaction, however, turned sharply against the visible gash at the skyline. Under mounting criticism (and while running for mayor), William halted quarrying in 1906 and announced he would mask the wound with “a building similar to a Japanese pagoda,” using stone from the abandoned cut on the cliff ledge itself. The Pagoda’s completion the following year transformed the site from an extraction face to an overlook, and early postcards still show the raw rock remnant directly beneath its galleries. The Witman quarry is thus best understood as a short-lived, turn-of-the-century cut whose “closure by owner” prefigured the city’s later, forced shutdowns of the larger quarries up-slope.
2) The Kirschmann Quarry (mid-mountain, above N. 14th & W. Green)
Far larger and more contentious was the Kirschmann operation on the western slope, plainly visible above North 14th at West Green. The site drew sustained editorial fire after a November 1909 visit by Japanese professionals who—with brutal candor—questioned why Reading would preserve distant hills yet “destroy the natural beauties of Mt. Penn, right at your very doors.” Local newspapers amplified the rebuke and, from 1910 onward, campaigned to stop the “mutilation” of the mountain. Despite these appeals, quarrying intensified. On December 5, 1912—“twenty days before Christmas”—operator Edward Kirschmann detonated 25 pounds of dynamite, loosening roughly 5½ tons of rock and exposing a new face about 145 by 110 feet. The Times’ reaction was immediate: a March 5, 1913 editorial warned the site would soon be “scarred beyond repair” unless halted. After Edward’s death, his son Harry E. Kirschmann leased the works and continued under the name Mt. Penn Sand & Stone Works. City hall finally acted on March 16, 1922: backed by a $50,000 grant, Reading purchased the Kirschmann property outright and ordered operations stopped. The plant, though idle, remained on the ground until the city’s 1924 public sale dispersed buildings, crusher, track, belts, and rolling stock—veteran quarrymen later remarked the equipment fetched “less than scrap.”
3) The Reading Sand & Stone Company / “Kostenbader Tract” (mid-mountain, the larger neighbor)
Immediately adjacent—and ultimately larger—was the tract associated with Reading Sand & Stone Company, incorporated April 29, 1916, by Samuel M. Lazarus (Egypt, PA), August F. Kostenbader (Catasauqua), and Lewis H. Rothrauff (West Reading). A 1919 deed describes a fully equipped industrial plant—stable, stone crusher, quarry buildings, engines and boiler—straddling the City of Reading and Lower Alsace Township, a dual jurisdiction that complicated enforcement and valuations. Through 1921, rumors swirled (vehemently denied by Mayor John K. Stauffer) that the city sought to acquire Kirschmann and then Reading Sand & Stone; in practice, council had to juggle finances to secure both sites. Trade journals by April 5, 1922 reported the city’s intent to take Reading Sand & Stone “out of operation,” citing, among other reasons, risk to the large nearby reservoir. That same year and into 1923, condemnation proceedings and price haggling escalated: Kostenbader placed the property’s value at $70,000, while the city initially offered roughly $16,000. Industry figures testified on both sides; a Birdsboro quarry manager said the rock reserve was extensive but the plant’s equipment was “junk,” while Reading Sand & Stone’s president insisted orders exceeded capacity. Court-appointed viewers ultimately awarded $45,000 for 18 acres (October 13, 1923), with separate compensation to the lessee. On March 15, 1924 the city solicitor instructed the prothonotary to have the sheriff seize the premises; the next day Sheriff John S. Esterly served a writ of possession on Rothrauff and posted police at the gates. After a further appeal, the city authorized the July 11, 1924 public sale that liquidated buildings and plant; a small concrete office/scale house by 14th & Buttonwood was retained for municipal use.
Why the city forced the closures: aesthetics, safety, and water-works risk
From 1910 to 1913, the Reading Times hammered home an aesthetic argument—“halt the desolating hands”—framing the mountain as a civic backdrop to be preserved. The case strengthened when engineers warned that continued blasting could imperil the Buttonwood Street Reservoir (built 1895). By 1922, even national industry press noted that danger to the “large reservoir near the quarry” was a reason to take over the sites. The reservoir itself had an uneven service life (cracks sidelined it by 1909), and in 1938 the city pursued a PWA-funded companion reservoir north at the top of Green Street, designed as an underground, grass-covered tank that would also help “re-clothe” the sand-scarred hillside. Both reservoirs are now out of service, but the Buttonwood gauge house survives—an orientation point in old aerials that also fixes the quarries’ vertical reach.
“Re-clothing” Mount Penn: the long debate over what to do with the scars
Once the city had the ground, debate shifted from “stop” to “how to heal.” Proposals ranged from pragmatic reforestation to spectacular civic monuments. In March 1922 the Berks County Conservation Society floated vines and evergreens plus an illuminated WWI memorial on the quarry floor; the Muhlenberg Brothers produced drawings touting a white, “alabaster sheen” shaft visible by day and floodlit by night—Reading’s answer to the Parthenon or Grant’s Tomb, as one advocate put it. Others invoked the Butchart Gardens model and, repeatedly (1924, 1930, 1933), architect H. Van Buren Magonigle promoted a 20,000-seat amphitheater with courts, fields, grandstand, parking, and a Civic Memorial featuring statuary of indigenous inhabitants and early settlers. The Depression’s finances—and public taste—kept these dreams on paper. In 1928, renowned tree surgeon Solan L. Parkes championed an “assist nature” plan funded by an anonymous donor: dynamite to fracture faces, then vines and spruce to capture soil and begin a living mantle; “There’s a lot more to conservation than conversation,” Parkes quipped to council. The grand memorialists and the re-foresters clashed; the money vanished; and, over decades, the mountain largely healed by succession—though the bench lines remain readable from certain angles, and the 1967 “Peace Rock” (a 30-foot peace sign painted on the slope) has become its own, graffiti-layered curiosity.
What you can still see
At the Pagoda—the former Witman quarry—the engineered shelf beneath the building is essentially the old quarry face, preserved in place; period postcards and early photographs line up almost perfectly with today’s cliff profile. Mid-slope above North 14th and West Green Streets, the Kirschmann and Reading Sand & Stone tracts now make up the city water-bureau lands inside the Mount Penn Preserve, threaded with walking and cycling routes, including the mile-long Peace Path from the Pagoda. The Buttonwood Street reservoir gauge house remains the most dependable locator tying 1920s aerials to the present landscape: its small, triangular white roof in the old images pinpoints the upper benches with precision.
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