The AM General Plant, 13200 McKinley Highway — the ground the Humvee came from

1984–present · THE WORLD-FAMOUS PRODUCT'S HOME GROUND

The fame: The most widely recognized object ever made in Mishawaka is a vehicle. The High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle — the HMMWV, the Humvee — was designed and is built by AM General at its military assembly plant at 13200 McKinley Highway, on the city's east side, and the first production vehicle came off the line here in 1984. The Center for Land Use Interpretation, whose land-use database catalogs the significant industrial ground of the United States, carries the plant as a site of record and states the scale plainly: more than 100,000 Humvees were made here in the decade after the first one. The vehicle's fame is not a local boast; the Humvee became, through the Gulf War's television coverage and three decades of war reporting since, one of the most recognized military machines on earth — and its home ground, the place answerable to the question “where are military Hummers made,” is this plant, in this city. The state's own air permits fix the ground in the public record: Indiana Department of Environmental Management Part 70 permits name AM General Corporation, 13200 McKinley Highway, Mishawaka, as a plant “for the production of HUMMERs for military and commercial use.”

The ground: Two plants stand in the record and are kept apart here as the AM General record of this history keeps them apart. The military plant at 13200 McKinley Highway is the Humvee's ground and remains AM General's. The commercial plant at 12900 McKinley Highway, a 675,500-square-foot facility built for the civilian Hummer H2, passed out of AM General's hands — bought by SF Motors in November 2017, announced for Electric Last Mile Solutions in December 2020, and carried since under the Mullen name; its course belongs to the AM General and automobiles records. The company's headquarters and its whole corporate history — from the Willys-Overland descent through the General Motors agreements of 21 December 1999 and the 11,818 civilian H1s — stand whole in this history's AM General flagship, and are not retold here. What this chapter adds is only the location's standing: of all the ground in Mishawaka, this is the ground the outside world has the most reason to be able to name, and the fame is the product's, earned on other continents, addressed to a McKinley Highway gate.

Sources:

1. Center for Land Use Interpretation, Land Use Database — the AM General plant entry: the first HMMWV off the assembly line here in 1984, and more than 100,000 made over the following decade.
2. Indiana Department of Environmental Management, Part 70 operating permits 141-6023-00031 and modifications — AM General Corporation, 13200 McKinley Highway, Mishawaka: “a stationary plant for the production of HUMMERs for military and commercial use”; the HUMMER II plant at the same address.
3. Inside Indiana Business (30 May 2018) and the Indiana Economic Development Corporation release (17 December 2020) — the commercial plant at 12900 McKinley Highway, 675,500 square feet, its sale to SF Motors and the Electric Last Mile announcement.
4. The AM General flagship record of this history — the company whole: the 1999 General Motors agreements, the H1 production count, the plant's course to 2025.