Map · Establishments · Calloway-Harmon
An establishment in Harmon
Six hundred and forty-two jobs across three shifts, and one report on a desk in the town hall basement, written in a hand the mayor has not yet learned to fear.
— The Honest Woman, chapter eleven
Calloway-Harmon Industrial Works occupies a forty-acre site at the south end of Cass Street, on the west bank of the Harmon River, eight blocks south of downtown. The original buildings date to 1953, when the Calloway brothers of Pittsburgh chose Harmon for a precision-parts subsidiary and the township sold them the land at a price subsequent generations of selectmen have, alternately, defended and apologized for.
The plant currently runs three shifts: first (6–2), second (2–10), third (10–6). Total employment in the most recent payroll year was six hundred and forty-two. The plant is the largest single employer in the county. If the plant closes, which it has been rumored to be considering for the entirety of the period the books cover, Harmon ceases, in any operational sense, to be a viable township.
The plant is permitted to discharge a specified volume of process water to the Harmon River under a permit administered by the state EPA and renewed at five-year intervals. The water reports are filed monthly by an officer of the plant, countersigned by the town clerk, and forwarded to the regional office. The volume and content of those discharges are, in The Honest Woman, the central object of the book’s suspense.
Ruth Calloway, no relation to the founding brothers, despite the name, has been the town clerk who countersigns those reports for nineteen years. The book is about what she does in the twentieth.
The plant is the only place in the series where most of the male protagonists of the town have, at some point, worked. David Marsh’s father retired from the plant in 1998. Boyd Haskell’s late son had a summer job in the foundry. Dennis Reilly’s brother runs a vendor company that the plant’s purchasing department has, since 2017, been declining to do business with for reasons that are, in The Loyal Man, the load-bearing question.
The plant is also where the books most directly take up the question the series, at its level, is about: the cost of survival. The town survives at the price of the river. The river survives if the report Ruth files in May is the report the town does not survive. There is no version of the story in which everyone wins.