An Allentown Story

My grandfather was a wholesale butcher who would deliver meat to corner stores with a horse and wagon.  Family lore has it that on a Sunday, the horse would not take the family on its social outing until he first completed the store route. My grandfather passed away when I was two, and of course I have no memory of the horse and wagon era.

The family lived on the corner of Chew and Jordan, with a small barn structure behind the yard on current Jute St. In a the late 1960's, a friend wanted to show me his younger brother's hot rod, which he was building in a rented garage somewhere in town. 

As we approached the garage, while the brother and hot rod were unknown to me, the structure wasn't. When Jim worked on his car, he had no idea that fifty years earlier my grandfather harnessed his horse to his wagon in the same garage. The old wooden garage is no longer there, but the house, now over a century old, shelters on.

Jim, like his father before him, would go on to work for Mack Truck. When Mack moved production to Winnsboro, South Carolina in 1987, Jim went with them. While production only lasted there for 15 years, today there is a community of retired Mack workers and their children still living around Winnsboro. Allentown officials over the years establish sister cities for political benefit, but Winnsboro really is connected.