The Factory Town That Made Everything

By the end of the nineteenth century, York County held hundreds of factories. That is worth sitting with. A county of farmers and market-town craftsmen, settled by German immigrants less than a hundred and sixty years before, had remade itself into one of the denser concentrations of manufacturing in the mid-Atlantic region.

The transformation followed the roads and railroads that opened markets the horse-and-wagon economy could never reach. Iron foundries came first, then specialty manufacturers who turned iron into farm implements, then machinery, then precision parts. One of the signature industries was agricultural implements.

Companies like the Hench and Dromgold Company supplied plows and cultivators to the grain farms of the surrounding counties and eventually to buyers across several states. The region's craftsmen, trained in the German guild tradition, transferred their precision to metal work with the same attention they had given to pottery and cabinetmaking. By the early nineteen hundreds, York was producing carriages and automobiles, textiles, paper, chain, and industrial equipment.

The county sent material to both World Wars and retooled afterward. The York County History Center's Agricultural and Industrial Museum, housed in a former factory complex, holds the record of this manufacturing life: the machines, the tools, the product lines, and the photographs of the men and women who worked them. York made things.

That was the animating fact of the city for two centuries running.