GM reopens Durant-Dort factory as historical archive and research library

Photos by Jason Robinson, courtesy GM.

More than 100,000 documents and artifacts related to Flint carriagebuilding and early General Motors history have made their way to the newly reopened Flint factory that once served as the base of operations for the automaker’s founders.

“Factory One is part of the very fabric of Flint, and its reopening is as much about the future as it is the past,” said Kevin Kirbitz, operations manager for the building, earlier this week as GM revealed the restoration and renovation work that went into it.

And while GM’s press release about the reopening hailed Durant-Dort Factory One (as the company is now calling it) as “the company’s birthplace and epicenter of the global auto industry,” its ties to the automaker aren’t quite as direct.

Built in 1880 as a wool and cotton mill, the building became the first of William C. Durant and J. Dallas Dort’s carriage factories six years later. While both men would eventually come to embrace the automobile – Durant in 1904 and Dort in 1912 or so – Factory One would remain a carriage factory up until 1917, long after Durant signed the incorporation papers for General Motors in the carriage factory’s offices in a three-story building across the street. Even after Dort converted the factory into an automobile factory, it produced Dort cars, which remained separate from General Motors until the company folded in 1924.

Nevertheless, GM – at the prodding of its North America president, Mark Reuss – bought the factory in May of 2013 for an undisclosed sum. While Reuss and other GM officials at the time had no concrete plans for the former factory and entertained the possibility of displaying a portion of the GM Heritage Collection there, plans for an archive and research center alongside an events space coalesced in 2015. Since then, GM has replaced the doors and windows and replaced about 17,000 bricks as part of the 30,000-square-foot facility’s renovation.

Included in that renovation is a glass-encased vapor-sealed room in the center of the building designed to house the archives. Assembled by historian Richard Scharchburg in 1974, the archives not only include Durant’s papers – among them correspondence related to the formation of General Motors – but also documents and artifacts related to Charles Kettering, Harlow Curtice, Pete Estes, and other notable GM executives. The archives have since been housed at Kettering University, which also recently donated the world’s largest automotive patent collection to the Gilmore Car Museum.

The archives will be free and open to the public by appointment. For more information on the facility or the archives, visit GMFactoryOne.com.