The Fascinating Story of Mack Trucks From a Brooklyn Workshop to America's Toughest Truck

A bulldog sits on the hood of every Mack truck rolling down an American highway. Stub-nosed, jaw set, cast in chrome. The phrase hit me like a Mack truck is part of the American lexicon. Mack trucks haul concrete to building sites, collect garbage in cities across the country, pull tractor-trailers along the interstates, and carry steel into the same kinds of construction projects they have carried into for over a century. The brand is one of the oldest names in motorized transport still in business. It is also the truck that British soldiers nicknamed the Bulldog during World War One because they could not think of anything tougher to compare it to.
In eighteen ninety three, none of that exists. Horse-drawn wagons dominate the streets of New York. The dairies in Brooklyn use teams of horses to deliver milk bottles to the stoops of the city. The motor vehicle is barely an idea. The commercial truck is not yet a category. The problem of moving heavy loads on American roads is the same problem that has existed since the Roman ox cart. The wagons that haul the freight break under the weight. The horses pulling them break under the weight. The men driving them break under the weight. No one has built the unbreakable one.
At Third Avenue and Twenty-Second Street in Brooklyn, two brothers are about to buy a small carriage and wagon factory called Fallesen and Berry. They are wagon builders. They have spent their lives around heavy haulage equipment. They are about to spend the next thirty years trying to build something nobody has built before. The older brother is named John M. Mack, but everyone calls him Jack. He is twenty nine years old. He was born in eighteen sixty four on a farm in Mount Cobb, Pennsylvania, one of nine children in an immigrant teamster family.

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