Norfolk Assembly
ford factory near Norfolk, Virginia (1925-2007)
Norfolk Assembly was a Ford manufacturing plant that opened on April 20, 1925 on the Elizabeth River, near downtown Norfolk, Virginia, eventually closing in 2007 as part of Ford's Way Forward restructuring — after manufacturing more than 7.9 million cars and trucks over almost a century of production.
Modeled after the River Rouge Plant, the facility eventually included a power house, water treatment plant, barber shop, safety-shoe store, restaurant, fitness center and TV studio. At the time of its closure, Ford employed more than 2,600 people at the 2,800,000-square-foot (260,000 m2) facility. Ford invested $375 million at the plant in 2002 to upgrade it for production of the redesigned eleventh generation 2004 F-150.
Archival papers of the noted industrial architect Albert Kahn (housed at the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan) indicate that in 1934 Kahn's office prepared drawings for architectural work at Norfolk Assembly.
Norfolk Assembly produced models including the Model T, Model A and school bus chassis. The last model manufactured at the plant was the F150.
Early history
As early as 1915, Ford Motor Company began planning a large assembly plant in Norfolk, projecting an initial investment of $300,000 ($7.4M in 2017 dollars), estimating an annual assembly of more than 2,000 cars and identifying several suitable sites.
The Mayor of Norfolk, S. Heth Tyler, drove the first Model T off the Norfolk Assembly line on April 20, 1925. At the time, the plant was the largest non-seafaring-related manufacturing enterprise in Norfolk.
“Norfolk Assembly” enters the record as ford factory near Norfolk, Virginia (1925-2007). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Norfolk, Assembly and ford can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Norfolk Assembly” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.