Courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society

The Twin Cities’ two mayors were bursting with enthusiasm as they rode the first car to come down the line at St. Paul's Ford plant 85 years ago.

Friday's shutdown of St. Paul's Ford plant marks the end of an era that began on May 4, 1925, when the first car rolled off the assembly line at the Highland Park factory.

On that spring day, more than 85 years ago, the Twin Cities' two mayors were bursting with enthusiasm as they rode the first car coming down the line. "The opening of the new Ford plant is the beginning of a new industrial development in the Twin Cities. It is an epochal day," declared Minneapolis Mayor George Leach. "Now, our two cities are going to grow enormously," added St. Paul Mayor Arthur Nelson.

The two mayors stepped out of the car and handed the keys over to a local auto dealer, W. S. Williams, who purchased the country's first St. Paul-made Ford. Williams had driven to the plant in a Lincoln, but he would drive away in a Tudor sedan decorated with signs announcing that it was first car manufactured in Minnesota's capital city. The proud new owner was greeted with cheers all along his route as he drove from Highland Park into downtown St. Paul.

During its first few weeks, the new plant produced about 50 cars a day, but production soon ballooned by 10 times that amount as the plant reached its peak production later in the year.

Looking for work
Throngs of job seekers showed up at the plant gate, seeking work during those early weeks, but many of them may have been disappointed. Initially, the workforce for the new St. Paul plant was drawn from the 900 employees at Ford's existing assembly facility in a 10-story building at 5^th Avenue and 5^th Street in Minneapolis. The Minneapolis plant, only 10 years old in 1925, had already become obsolete. It closed for good soon after the St. Paul plant open but was retooled as an office building, which now overlooks Minneapolis's Target Field.

Perched on the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River, the new St. Paul plant had a special relationship to the river. At 8 a.m. on opening day, a plant superintendent flicked a switch that diverted power from the adjacent river dam into the plant. Newly named the Ford Dam, the controversial Mississippi River dam had been completed eight years earlier and would now power one of the region's largest industrial operations.

Next to the dam, an upgraded Lock Number 1 would facilitate shipment of auto parts and completed cars up and down the Mississippi. On opening day in 1925, two barges were docked near St. Paul's Robert Street bridge, waiting to move upstream and through Lock Number 1 to receive their first load of Ford cars to be shipped downstream to distribution points along the river.

'Indecision, delay and mistakes'
While local and state politicians were effusive in their praise for the new assembly plant on opening day, the project had not always enjoyed full political support while it was still on the drawing boards. On a day when everyone else in St. Paul was celebrating, the St. Paul Pioneer Press complained that individual initiative by Henry Ford had overcome years of governmental "indecision, delay and mistakes."

"It is nearly sixty years since the Legislature of Minnesota petitioned Congress to improve the river between Twin Cities with a lock and dam… and eight years since the high dam was finally completed," the paper reported. "That was 1917. Yet for five years nothing was done to utilize the power made available by the $2 million structure.

"Then along came Henry Ford. It is less than three years since the Ford Motor Company filed its application for a power permit, less than three years since Minneapolis went on record against the project; less than three years since Mayor Nelson and Mayor Leach were debating the project; two years and six months since Ford purchased its factory site and 18 months since excavation for the plant begun.

"Finally, the wheels of Ford's plant, the greatest of all his factories outside of Detroit, are humming. The power that has been going to waste all these years is being utilized… What new degrees of growth and prosperity does the operation of the Ford plant mean? We do not know. But the growth will be great and the prosperity commensurate. That we are confident," the Pioneer Press concluded in 1925.

Now, in 2011, the St. Paul paper has sounded a more somber note with the shutdown of the state's only automotive factory. "It is sad that this is what it has come to," one of the plant's last remaining workers told the Pioneer Press when the word came from Ford headquarters in October that the sprawling Highland Park complex would close in December.

But unlike other shuttered automotive factories, located in industrial wastelands all over the country's rustbelt, the Minnesota plant is surrounded by a prime swath of urban real estate. Local leaders are hopeful that this strategic location will generate development opportunities for the Ford site, and a bright new day for St. Paul, like the one that dawned on May 4, 1925.