Located across the Schuylkill River from Reading, a vast city of rowhomes, the Berks County borough of Wyomissing, Pa., remains as it was intended over a century ago: the ideal suburb. Curving boulevards and tidy avenues, canopied by trees, feature beautiful housing amid parks and trails. Then, beyond Penn Avenue, sprawling before semi-detached houses, are the Knitting Mills – a monument to the community’s foresight.
Planning ahead is a tradition in Wyomissing, where, early last century, founders Ferdinand Thun and Henry Janssen meticulously designed a town for posterity. From the beginning, these visionary German immigrants ensured that the Knitting Mills – then known as Wyomissing Industries – adapted to the times. And so, as women’s fashion dramatically changed in the 1920s, Thun and Janssen’s enterprise became the world’s top manufacturer of women’s hosiery. When the Great Depression struck, they redeployed workers to build attractive homes for all economic classes in Wyomissing and its sister community, West Reading.
