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Friends of my wife were camping in a city park in Bridgman Michigan and met a man who claimed that there was once a Packard engine plant in the town near where the park is now.

Anyone know anything about this?

Bridgman is on the southwestern coast a few miles north of St. Jo/Benton Harbor.....

I'm curious about this, too. My wife and I will be IN Bridgman in a couple of weeks!

I'm not aware of any such facility, but one of the acknowledged experts on Packard's facilities in Michigan is Arthur Balfour. You might want to contact him, he's in the PAC Membership Directory.

Another place to look would be the company's annual reports to the stockholders. Typically such reports list significant corporate-owned properties and facilities.

Perhaps there was a Foundry there.

Kev, the foundry was on Harper Ave in Detroit, right adjacent to the main plant. It was there for decades right up to it's sale in 1954. We know they farmed out their foundry work in 1955/56 to Lakey Foundry & Machine Co., Muskegon; perhaps there was some other outsourcing? If you study the extensive article by Balfour on East Grand, it dtails which activities took place on which floors of which buildings over the years, and automotive, marine and aircraft engines including those for the military were all done at East Grand.

So this possible facility in Bridgman is interesting and worth tracking down. I've just made a query to Mr. Balfour and if I learn anything significant I'll revise this post.

UPDATE: To paraphrase Mr. Balfour's response, to the best of his knowledge there is not a scrap of evidence that Packard ever had a facility in Bridgman, MI.

I got a triumphal email back that the land was donated by Martin Marietta Aggregates, which somehow "proves" the Packard connection. Sand for airplanes?

Is there any connection between them and Packard? Seems unlikely....

The only connection I'm aware of between Martin-Marietta and Packard is that both corporate names begin with a letter of the alphabet.