GROVE CITY – In an industrial development that will bring more than 50 jobs to Mercer County, a Beaver County company is purchasing the former Cooper Industries plant in an overall deal valued at $12 million.
Hall Industries, an international company headquartered in Franklin Township near Ellwood City, bought the entire building complex, totaling 468,000 sq. ft. and 28 acres for around $3.2 million, Penn-Northwest Development Corp. said. Improvements and repairs to the sprawling complex along with new equipment will consume the remaining amount of about $9 million.
The project is expected to create 57 jobs over three years. Hall Industries will use the site to produce industrial equipment known in the railroad industry as rotary rail car dumpers. These aren’t railroad cars. Rather, they are a giant piece of equipment that can turn railroad cars over to allow material such as coal or grain to be quickly unloaded.
Hall scouted several locations for the project but picked Grove City. Mercer County had an edge over other sites in an important category – one of Hill’s top executives is a local.
“I’ve been familiar with the site for some time as our business has grown,” Tony Kaper, Hall’s vice president of operations. Kaper lives in Sandy Lake, a 15-minute drive to Grove City. “We’re very excited about this project.”
Under the deal, Hall will receive a $114,000 state grant from the Department of Community and Economic Development for workforce training, plus a $723,000 Pennsylvania First grant and $2.65 million in loans through the Pennsylvania Industrial Development Authority.
The plant had housed Cooper Industries for generations and produced compressors for gas and other industries. Cooper closed the plant decades ago, and the site has been used as a multi-tenant industrial dwelling that was privately owned.
The complex was called Cooper Industrial Commons but will be Cooper Commons LLC under the new ownership.
“We started working on this project 18 months ago,” said Gary Dovey, vice president of business development for Penn-Northwest, Mercer County’s lead economic development agency. “The state did a lot of work to make sure this wasn’t a company that was going into a new location and then quickly moving out.”
Under Hall’s plans, the site will continue to have existing tenants, Kaper said.
“And we want to improve other areas to house other businesses in the near future,” he added.
Hall was founded in 1966 by Harold Hall, an engineer and World War II veteran, and still is owned by the Hall family.
In Pennsylvania the company has operations in Ellwood City, at Pittsburgh International Airport, at Philadelphia International Airport and in Canonsburg, Washington County. It also has operations in South Carolina, Florida, New York, Alabama, Virginia and internationally in the Czech Republic.
Hall Industries has a video that shows the rail car dumping device at work, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggO61EzqTHk
