Berwick, Pennsylvania

Berwick was laid out in seventeen eighty-six by a Quaker settler named Evan Owen on the west bank of the Susquehanna River, named for Berwick-upon-Tweed in northern England. The town's industrial destiny arrived in the early nineteen hundreds when the American Car and Foundry Company established a massive railcar plant here. In nineteen oh four, that plant produced one of the first all-steel passenger cars, built to order for the brand-new New York City Subway.

When World War Two came, the same factory pivoted to tanks, turning out more than fifteen thousand armored vehicles and making Berwick one of the nation's major tank-producing communities. The plant that started with subway cars ended up helping win a world war.