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East of the city at East Pontiac Street and Bueter Road, International Harvester built the other pole of Fort Wayne industry: a $5 million truck plant, construction begun in 1922, from which the first trucks rolled in December 1923. The complex grew into one of the largest truck factories in the world — the one-millionth truck, a semi-tractor, in 1963; 1,527,299 medium and heavy trucks over sixty years; peak employment of 10,600; and the civic title that went with it, "Heavy-Duty Truck Capital of the World." In an adjacent plant Harvester built the Scout, the pioneering sport-utility vehicle, from November 1960 to October 1980 — 532,674 of them, the first out Door #11 on December 1, 1960. When Harvester's finances collapsed, the choice fell between Fort Wayne and Springfield, Ohio; the closure of Fort Wayne was announced on Monday, September 27, 1982 — the announcement led the Journal Gazette's front page on September 28, and the last truck rolled off the line on July 15, 1983. Much of the plant survives in industrial reuse; Navistar kept an engineering and test presence in the city for decades after (the test track closed in 2015), and since 2019 the Harvester Homecoming festival has gathered the plant's people and trucks at the old works on Meyer Road.
Sources: ACGSI, International Harvester Fort Wayne page, drawing on the Journal Gazette (September 28, 1982; June 29, 2017); Input Fort Wayne, Harvester Homecoming / Fort Wayne Truck Works Museum (drawing on Beatty, History of Fort Wayne and Allen County); Hagerty, "We Drive Vintage Scouts" (2024), for the Scout production figures and dates.