Matthew Tuerk

We hit the Liberty Bell there.

but it really picked up and incorporated in 1867 for the kind of reconstruction.

And that's when the industry really started to, it started to industrialize like many American cities.

Early industry was cigar manufacturing.

So tobacco that was grown in Lancaster was shipped to Allentown for production into cigars.

Silk manufacturing became a pretty big deal in that area.

It was a place where silk could be brought in and then processed.

In the early kind of 1910s, sort of around the First World War, Mack Truck moved to Allentown from Brooklyn.

This was like 1915.

And industrial production of those vehicles started.

We manufactured Volte bombers, a particular type of bomber for World War II.

This is all coincident with Bethlehem's steel industry rising up.

The industrial...

work continued through to i think you guys mentioned the transistor and western electric that was kind of a big story but then like a lot of places uh manufacturing started to decline not as strongly in allentown as other parts of the country but

you know the western electric plant eventually shut down the what year were we talking about with that western electric was in the 70s it actually and it it morphed into something else that eventually became broadcom so there's still some manufacturing it didn't necessarily exist in the city it spread out into suburban parts of the region there's still some chip manufacturing occurring or wafer polishing occurring in the area we still have the

kind of muscle memory of semiconductor manufacturing.

But again, the industry evolved and changed.

The Volte aircraft shut down when there was no need to produce bombers anymore.

Mack trucks continued operations in Allentown, but in the 80s shifted most of its production to a plant in Macungie that still operates today.

A lot of those old Mack plants were acquired by an organization that I used to work for, the Allentown Economic 12 Incorporation,