Muscletown USA

For roughly half a century, from the nineteen thirties through the nineteen eighties, the capital of American weightlifting was not a city with a famous gym or an athletic university. It was York, Pennsylvania, a manufacturing town in the South Mountain foothills, and the reason was one man: Bob Hoffman. Hoffman came to York to run an oil-burner business in the early nineteen twenties.

He was a competitor himself, a physical culturist in the old sense, and his real passion was the barbell. By the early years of the Depression, he had pivoted the factory floor from oil burners to barbells, founding the York Barbell Company. He also launched a magazine, Strength and Health, that went to readers across the country and eventually across the world.

Hoffman coached the United States Olympic weightlifting team from nineteen thirty-six through nineteen sixty-eight, a run of more than three decades, and athletes came to York from everywhere to train. The city earned the name Muscletown USA, a nickname that was not ironic. York Barbell became one of only three companies in the world certified to manufacture weights for the Olympic Games, producing equipment for the nineteen fifty-two, nineteen sixty-eight, and nineteen eighty-four games.

The training halls drew champions who would go on to set world records and win gold medals on multiple continents. When Hoffman died in nineteen eighty-five, the company he built was still the nation's leading supplier of Olympic-style lifting equipment. The York Barbell Museum, housed near the original factory site, preserves the barbells, the trophies, and the photographs of men and women who came to this factory town to become the strongest people on earth.