Belvidere: Where Chrysler Came Looking for Workers

Belvidere, Illinois, a small city in Boone County about eighty miles northwest of Chicago, found its modern identity in nineteen sixty-five when Chrysler opened an assembly plant. It was Chrysler's newest facility at the time, built in nineteen sixty-four and sixty-five to assemble full-size Chrysler and Plymouth models. The plant became one of the region's largest employers.

Less than two years after opening, an F-four tornado tore through the area on April twenty-first, nineteen sixty-seven, destroying three hundred new vehicles sitting in the plant's lot. The plant survived and kept building cars for decades, eventually becoming one of the longest-running auto assembly operations in the Midwest under Chrysler, then Fiat Chrysler, and then Stellantis.