Harley Comes to York

Before motorcycles were built here, the plant on Eden Road was something else entirely. During World War Two and through the years that followed, the site operated as a Special Ordnance facility, turning out casings for five-hundred-pound bombs, rocket motors for target drones, components for Titan missiles. When the Navy was done with it in nineteen sixty-four, American Machine and Foundry bought the building.

Then, in nineteen sixty-nine, AMF bought Harley-Davidson outright, and a plan began to take shape: move final motorcycle assembly from Milwaukee to York. Production began at the York plant in nineteen seventy-three. The scale was new: an overhead conveyor system several miles long carried frames, engines, fuel tanks, wheels, and fenders through the building in a continuous loop, components descending at intervals to assembly workers below.

The plant was the largest Harley-Davidson had ever operated. AMF's ownership became shorthand for decline. The motorcycles that rolled out in those years had a reputation for leaking oil and breaking down, and the brand suffered for it.

Then, in June of nineteen eighty-one, a group of thirteen investors led by Vaughn Beals and members of the Davidson family bought the company back in an eighty-million-dollar leveraged buyout. The York plant came with the deal. The new owners studied Japanese manufacturing methods directly, walking the Honda facility in Marysville, Ohio, and applied what they learned.

By the late nineteen eighties, the quality stigma of the AMF era had faded. York was building motorcycles that riders actively sought. Today the York facility is the largest Harley-Davidson factory in the world, employing more than two thousand workers in Springettsbury Township just northeast of the city.

Tours of the assembly floor are offered to the public.