Harley-Davidson Museum

The museum on Canal Street in Milwaukee's Menomonee Valley is devoted to a company that began in a shed so small you could park a car in it with room to spare.

In nineteen oh three, a young draftsman in his early twenties named William Harley and his friend Arthur Davidson began building a motorized bicycle in the Davidson family's backyard in Milwaukee. The shed measured ten feet by fifteen feet. Arthur's father, a cabinetmaker, had built it. By the end of that summer they had completed their first motorcycle. It produced about two and a half horsepower and couldn't climb Milwaukee's hills without the rider pedaling to help.

They built three that year. Arthur's brothers Walter and William joined the enterprise. By nineteen oh four they had doubled the shed and built eight motorcycles. By nineteen oh seven they had incorporated, with Walter Davidson serving as first president. By nineteen twenty, Harley-Davidson had become the largest motorcycle manufacturer in the world, with dealers in sixty-seven countries.

The company survived the Great Depression, the rise of cheaper foreign competition, and a near-collapse in the early nineteen eighties when Japanese manufacturers had taken the bulk of the American market. A management buyout in nineteen eighty-one and a return to quality engineering reversed the slide. By the time the museum opened on July twelfth, two thousand eight, Harley-Davidson had become something more than a motorcycle company: it had become a symbol, attached to a certain idea of American freedom, open roads, and mechanical self-reliance.

The museum holds more than four hundred and fifty motorcycles, including the oldest known surviving Harley-Davidson, a nineteen oh three or nineteen oh four machine known as Serial Number One. It sits in a floor-level display embedded in the outline of the original shed.

Five blocks from here, on Juneau Avenue, stands the factory building where all of this scaled up. The original shed is gone, but the address is marked.