Framingham Assembly
Framingham Assembly was a General Motors factory in Framingham, Massachusetts which opened in 1947.
The plant was built on the location of Framingham Airport, and ground was broken in 1945. The plant cost $12 million and was one of three new plants that year. At one point, the Framingham Assembly plant was the largest automotive manufacturing plant in the state, employing over 1,500 workers from Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Hampshire.
The first vehicle, produced on 26 February 1948, was a Buick, with 23,388 more produced that first year. The factory was used by "BOP" (Buick, Oldsmobile, Pontiac) and was under the management of GM's newly created Buick-Oldsmobile-Pontiac Assembly Division created in 1945. The factory had produced 697,574 cars by 1959. In August of that year, it became part of Fisher Body, producing Chevrolet, Pontiac, and Oldsmobile cars.
The factory was re-purposed again in May, 1968, changing from separate Fisher Body and Chevrolet Division operations to a combined operation under the new GM Assembly Division, to produce the Chevrolet Chevelle and Pontiac Le Mans. The Pontiac GTO was added in 1969. The Buick Skylark and Oldsmobile Cutlass were added in 1970. In 1981, the Chevrolet Celebrity and Pontiac 6000 were produced, with the Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera added for the 1983 model year.
The Framingham location was the center of several contentious tug-of-wars between Governor Michael Dukakis and local politician Anthony M. Colonna. After the town refused to sell General Motors a 35-acre (140,000 m2) town owned piece of property GM desired for the construction of a new paint and plastics facility, Dukakis used the state's power of eminent domain to take the property from the town and sell it to GM so the company could construct the $224 million facility. Colona, head of the town department public works and a powerful local politician, had desired a new, unified DPW facility to be constructed on the site. After the taking, state officials and executives at GM claimed that Colonna used his political influence in the community to delay the company's expansion of the facility and drum up support against the company.
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