For more than a century, a massive, six-story building at 1800 Grand Ave. has marked the west end of downtown.

The building straddles the southwest corner of Grand Avenue’s iconic intersection with Fleur Drive and Locust Street in an area that is now undergoing major renovations to improve storm drainage and make downtown safer for pedestrians and bicyclists.

Most people alive today know the glass, brick and masonry fortress on the corner as Des Moines Public Schools’ Central Campus, or Tech High School, which it was from 1953 through 1982.

But it was originally the city’s largest factory, built by Henry Ford in 1917 to assemble his Model T automobile, which was made from 1908 until 1927. It was later named the most influential car of the 20th century.

Des Moines’ Ford plant was the equivalent of six football fields stacked on top of each other. 

The story of how such a huge car plant came to Des Moines is told in author Bill Jepsen’s 328-page coffee-table book “Made in Iowa: Iowa’s Automobiles, an Entertaining and Enlightening History.”

Ford, Jepsen explained, was friends with Clyde Herring, an auto dealer who would go on to become Iowa’s governor and a U.S. senator during the 1930s.

Time magazine said the pair met when Herring was a young jeweler in Detroit and repaired Ford’s watch. Herring later moved to Colorado in 1902 and to a farm outside Atlantic, Iowa, in 1906.

In 1908, Herring wrote to Ford “on a whim,” according to Jepsen, “to see if Henry would sell me (a model T) at a wholesale price.” 

“Within a very short time, there came back two letters; one appointing Herring as a Ford dealer and another from a railroad agent saying that there were three automobiles waiting for him on a siding in Atlantic,” Jepsen reported. 

Herring sold two cars for a $300 profit and kept the third. It wasn’t long before he was selling Fords in Omaha and Des Moines, where he put down roots in 1910 and became Henry Ford’s favorite Iowan.

By 1916, Jepsen wrote, Iowa had more cars per capita than any state, with Fords comprising half of the 146,000 automobiles registered in Iowa.

On April 14, 1916, Ford visited Des Moines to see Herring and make a rare speech before students at Highland Park College. He told the students about his efforts to keep the United States out of the war in Europe, and he told Herring about his plans to create Model T assembly plants across the country.

Ford’s goal was to smooth nationwide distribution and lower shipping costs. While only three or four cars could be crammed into a boxcar, parts for 26 complete vehicles fit in the same space. “The shipping savings was substantial,” Jepsen wrote.

Construction on a Des Moines plant began in early 1917, a few months before the United States entered World War I. Work was slowed by the war effort, as well as a cave-in that nearly killed one worker and a labor strike.

In 1918, plans were announced to convert part of the empty plant to a hospital for injured soldiers, but a November armistice came before the medical conversion was complete.    

The cost of the plant grew from an original estimate of less than $500,000 to $600,000 by the time construction began and, ultimately, more than $1 million.

By the end of the war, Ford had another idea. He recognized the increasing importance of agriculture and drew up plans to assemble farm tractors, as well as Model Ts, in Des Moines. 

In 1919, one year before auto assembly began, the Des Moines plant hosted the city’s annual auto exposition, providing more than five times the space previously available at the Des Moines Coliseum, with room for four orchestras, according to the Des Moines Register. 

Operations at the plant finally began in 1920. By year’s end, 650 people worked in the plant. Employment peaked in 1926 at about 1,000.

The plant closed in 1933 because of the Great Depression.

It reopened under new ownership in 1942 to make airplane parts for World War II. But that’s a story for another day.