The story
Precursor company
In 1855, Thomas Dickson, with his brothers John and George, founded an engineering company named Dickson & Company in Carbondale, Pennsylvania. A year later it was moved to the newly incorporated Scranton, Pennsylvania, at the request of George Scranton. Their first major contract was to supply locomotives for a new railroad constructed by the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company. By 1862, business was booming and the company was re-incorporated as the Dickson Manufacturing Company.
Formation
The company maintained its main offices and shops on Penn Avenue in Scranton,. The Cliff Works, a locomotive manufacturing company on Cliff Street in Scranton was acquired in 1862. In 1866, a foundry in Wilkes-Barre, was added and later the company opened an office in New York City.
In the first years as the Dickson Manufacturing Company, five or six locomotives were being built each year. By the early 1870s, this had risen to five locomotives a month. They also built railroad cars and a variety of mining machinery. In 1882, they rebuilt their Penn Avenue shops, creating 29,000 square feet of space. The company continued to expand and by 1890 its shops covered six acres and employed more than 1,200 workers.
Acquisition
On June 24, 1901, the company's locomotive division was merged with seven other manufacturing firms to form American Locomotive Company (ALCO); the rest of the company became part of Allis-Chalmers. ALCO ceased locomotive production at the former Dickson works in 1909.
Recent history
The former shops still stand, and are featured in the opening sequence of the television show "The Office," which is set in Scranton.
From Wikipedia’s article on Dickson Manufacturing Company, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3