What was the first Ford plant to produce the Model T?

The Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit was the first Ford plant to produce the Model T. Ford completed the earliest production cars there before moving the model’s manufacture to larger facilities.

The first production Model T was built at Piquette in 1908, and the plant produced the first roughly 14,000 Model Ts assembled in the United States. Production there relied on skilled workers, interchangeable parts, and stationary work areas rather than the fully developed moving assembly line later associated with Ford.

Piquette is also important because Ford employees experimented there with moving a chassis between work areas. Those early trials helped point toward the production methods that Ford later implemented on a much larger scale at the Highland Park Ford Plant, beginning in 1913.

Highland Park is therefore a common mix-up. It became the famous mass-production site and built huge numbers of Model Ts, but it was not the first Ford plant to produce the model. The River Rouge complex came later and is associated with Ford’s more vertically integrated industrial system.