Last month, Patriarch announced that–due to unexpected current financial conditions– the company would cease operations. However, this plan was also changed the RD Murray plant shut down and half of the LTI plant closed.ĪLF had since moved out of the Summerville plant into a smaller plant in Moncks Corner, S.C. A new business plan was devised where the cabs and chassis would be built in Summerville along with the Condor line (commercial vehicles) and the fire truck bodies would be made at the old RD Murray plant in Hamburg, N.Y., and the LTI plant in Ephrata, Pa. This, too, was short-lived in 2008 the company filed bankruptcy. However, in 2007, ALF moved into yet another home: a new, 500,000 square foot building in Summerville, S.C. In 2005, it was announced that Patriarch Partners, a New York-based investment firm, had bought the company.
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ALF began building the entire line of apparatus and moved into a vacant Western Star truck plant in Ladson, S.C.
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Hebe bought LTI to make ladders for ALF and purchased 3D, Boardman, RD Murray, Rescue Master, Snorkel and a host of other companies. Freightliner put a great deal of money into ALF, building a chassis plant in North Carolina that primarily built ALF’s Eagle cabs and chassis for any manufacturer interested building their own bodies.īut that plan didn’t last long either. It wasn’t down for long, because in 1996, Freightliner Corporation, under the leadership of Jim Hebe (a former ALF employee), purchased the company. History soon repeated itself, and in 1994 Figgie announced that it would again close down ALF. The new company would be known as Kersey American LaFrance. The company started up in Bluefield, W.Va., in another plant occupied by Kersey Manufacturing and also owned by Figgie International. At this point, ALF had been in operation in one form or another in New York–once known as the fire engine capital of the world–for more than 150 years.īut the closure didn’t keep ALF down for long. But this location didn’t last long in 1985, Figgie announced it was shutting down the plant. It moved out of the older East La France Street plant in Elmira and into a larger, 500,000-square-foot plant, just down the road. In the early 1980s ALF underwent another corporate change, becoming a division of Figgie International, which owned Snorkel, Scott Aviation, Automatic Sprinkler and Safety Supply America. ALF itself started operations in 1903 in a large factory in Elmira, N.Y. The companies that eventually formed ALF built hand-drawn, hose-drawn and steam-powered fire apparatus as far back as 1832.
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Although this comes of no surprise to me or to anyone else in the fire apparatus industry, it brings to an end a 175-year saga in which the company seemed to have nine lives. So, American LaFrance (ALF) has closed its doors once again.