Mack Trucks and the Bulldog: Born in Brooklyn, Made in Allentown
Near Allentown, Pennsylvania
The bulldog hood ornament on a Mack truck is one of the most recognizable industrial symbols in America, and it was earned in the mud of World War One. The story of how it got there begins not in Allentown but in Brooklyn, and follows the Mack brothers on a journey toward something they could not have predicted when they started out making horse-drawn wagons.
John and Augustus Mack began in eighteen ninety-three, buying out a carriage factory in Brooklyn. They made delivery wagons, including milk wagons, brewery wagons, and contractors wagons. The economic depression of that year nearly ruined them. They survived by learning to repair gasoline engines, which turned out to be the skill that mattered.
In nineteen hundred, a Prospect Park administrator asked Augustus for a bus to carry sightseers around Brooklyn. John Mack built the engine himself rather than buying one. That bus became the foundation of the Mack Brothers Company. Five years later, in nineteen oh-five, they moved their automotive operations to Allentown, Pennsylvania, drawn by the available factory space, the skilled industrial labor, and the rail connections they needed to ship.
Allentown became Mack's home for the better part of a century. By nineteen eleven, the Allentown factory employed roughly seven hundred workers. The company standardized on truck production and, in nineteen sixteen, introduced the Model AC, a rugged, chain-driven heavy truck that would prove itself in the worst conditions on earth.
During World War One, the AC went to Europe. The British Army used roughly two thousand of them. When the trucks faced the impossible conditions of the Western Front, shell-cratered roads, mud thick enough to swallow a wheel, loads that would break ordinary vehicles, the ACs kept moving. British soldiers called them Bulldogs, shouting for the Mack Bulldogs when they needed something hauled through ground no other truck could cross. Mack adopted the name and the animal. The bulldog has been on the hood ever since.
