So while researching last week’s Divco-Jeep Six Degrees Challenge, I plunged into Robert Ebert and John Rienzo’s 1997 book, “Divco: A History of the Truck and Company,” and found that the two had presented quite a bit of knowledge and photographs of the various factories that produced Divcos over the company’s 60-year history. And as it turns out, the last of those factories has a personal connection.
But we’ll go through the factories chronologically. Ebert and Rienzo state that DIVCO’s first home in 1926 was in a small building on Fort Street West in Detroit, though they don’t provide a specific address or any photos of the building. Apparently, it was too small, because a year or so later, Divco (now technically the Divco-Detroit Corporation), moved to the Gemmer Manufacturing Company’s former factory at 2435 Merrick Avenue (same location on Bing maps) in Detroit, pictured above. Ebert and Rienzo state that the above photo greatly exaggerates the size of the plant, and there seems to be little indication of any such plant there now. Coachbuilt.com claims the factory still stands, today being used as a recycling center, while the atDetroit forum members note that the address was technically on the corner of Merrick and 16th, which today seems to be an empty lot filled with junk cars.
When Continental Motors bought Divco in 1932, Continental moved all Divco production to its plant at 12801 East Jefferson Avenue (same location on Bing maps) in Detroit. The authors wandered by that location in 1995 and shot the above photo, claiming that the smokestack was all that remained to remind anybody of the factory’s history. It looks like there is – or was – a Family Dollar at that location now, directly across the street from Continental Street. The atDetroit forums have a little more on the plant.
In 1936, Continental sold Divco to Twin Coach, but Divco remained in the Continental factory on Jefferson until 1938, when Twin Coach built Divco a brand-new factory at 22000 Hoover Road in Warren, Michigan (same location on Bing maps).
This building actually remains relatively intact today. The StreetView Maps are all blurry, but the 17.5-acre, 180,000-square-foot property that the factory sits on appears to be for sale for $3.9 million. According to Ebert and Rienzo, Divco sold the Hoover Road factory in 1969 to Chrysler, which used it for office space until the 1980s. Another nifty tidbit – check out the street names just to the west of the property.
Finally, we come to the last chapter of Divco, the one that strikes closest to home for me. You see, Divco was sold in 1968 to Transairco in Delaware, Ohio, the town in which I attended college and in which I lived for a short while. All Divco production was thus moved to Transairco’s cherry-picker factory off London Road, east of the railroad tracks (same location on Bing maps). My brother actually worked in the former Transairco factory west of the tracks for a short time in the early part of this decade, long after Transairco sold it to Horizon Industries.
Divco remained in Delaware and continued to produce milk trucks all the way through 1986, though only about 2,100 milk trucks were built there in those 18 years. After the 1986 bankruptcy, the property remained in the hands of the family that owned Transairco, which later sold the east-of-the-tracks factory to a pallet manufacturer, though I think at least part of it’s currently an auto detailing and maintenance center.
UPDATE (22.June 2009): TA and I added these four locations to his collaborative map of American automobile factories. Know of an automobile factory in your town? Add it to the map!
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