The Dodge Brothers / Dodge Main

John Dodge and Horace Dodge grew up in Niles, Michigan, and in the late nineteenth century worked as machinists at the Murphy Boiler Works in Detroit and at the Dominion Typograph Company in Windsor, Ontario. In Windsor they built the Evans and Dodge Bicycle, then founded their own shop in Detroit in 1900, where they built transmissions and engines for Ransom Olds in 1901-1902. From 1903 to 1914 they were Henry Ford's leading parts supplier, and in 1914 they built the first Dodge Brothers car. Dodge production ranked fourth among the 108 American car companies of the late 1910s. After operating two factories in Detroit's Greektown between 1900 and 1910, they bought a thirty-acre parcel on the east side of Joseph Campau Avenue, one-half mile south of here, and opened a factory there in 1910 to make parts for the Ford Motor Company. The Dodges began making their own cars in 1914, and by 1920 employed some 17,000 people. By 1925 the sprawling plant was called Dodge Main. When Walter Chrysler acquired Dodge in 1928, Dodge Main had 30,000 workers who made 230,000 cars annually. During the 1950s Dodge Main became exclusively an assembly plant with a smaller work force that turned out 600,000 cars a year. Fewer than 5,000 people worked at Dodge Main when the Chrysler Corporation closed it in 1980. The brothers caught influenza at the New York Auto Show in 1920, and both died from the pandemic disease that year, John on January 14 and Horace on December 10.

Hamtramck, Michigan · United States