Talk:Herman Born & Sons

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Herman Born and Sons, Inc.

On September 20, 1852 Herman Born, a 23-year old blacksmith, who had arrived from Germany two years prior, started his own forge and wagon shop at what is now 795 W. Saratoga Street, after buying out its owner for $225. His operation prospered, from the first customer who paid $.25 for repair work, until in 1868 he opened a larger shop on 798 Waesche Street. At that time, there were 60 employees, mostly German immigrants, who constructed delivery vans, huge beer wagons, and bread and butcher carts. Work included repair of wagons and carriages, blacksmithing and caring for sick and injured horses.

With the development of horseless transportation, wagon work became truck body manufacture and repair also including a tire shop that opened in 1917. As the manufacture of truck bodies became an assembly operation of large national firms, so Herman Born and Sons began to concentrate on custom work on truck bodies as well as repair and painting. For example, in 1947 the company created the first mobile studio for Baltimore’s first television station, WMAR, by converting an old Baltimore Transit Company bus. (That bus recently has been acquired by the Streetcar Museum.) Herman Born & Sons then went on to make the first television mini cam vans for this area. The creation of the Parentmobile from a bus for the Baltimore County Board of Education in 2000 is a more recent example of conversion/customization

Upon his 50th wedding anniversary, Herman retired in 1903, leaving the business to his sons Charles and John. With the passing of Charles in 1922, and of John in 1927, Carl Herman Born, Charles’ son, assumed ownership of the company, followed by his son Richard L. in 1940. In 1955, the company moved to its present location at 6808 Rolling Mill Road where it operates today as the premier truck body repair and rebuilding, custom modification, and paint and decaling shops in the greater Baltimore area. The body and paint shops employ over 20 people and service transportation fleets ranging from beverage trucks, utilities’ vehicles, school buses to conventional commercial van bodies. Richard Wilson Born, who started with the company in 1970, has been president since the death of his father in 1991. He is the fifth generation, making Herman Born and Sons one Baltimore’s oldest family run businesses. The sixth generation, Richard Ewing Born, has recently joined the company in 2008, as it approaches 160 years of continuous operation in 2012.

In its archives, Herman Born and Sons has a large collection of professional photographs of the wagons and early trucks it produced along with some interesting photographs of old downtown Baltimore. This collection of delivery and service vehicles reflects the development of commercial transportation as well as the mercantile history of Baltimore from 1850. Many of the pictures show wagons and trucks from companies no longer with us—Hochschild Kohn, Read’s Drug Stores, Gunther Beer, Levinson & Klein Furniture to those still alive and well, the Baltimore Sun, Hecht Brothers, Coca Cola, and the Baltimore Police Department.

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