The machinery works on Main Street

For most of the twentieth century, a large brick industrial building stood on Main Street, between Stiger and Bergen streets, turning out machinery.

It began in 1903 as the American Saw Mill Machinery Company. The firm did not run a mill; it built the equipment — circular sawmills, edgers, planers, shingle machinery, band saws, an excelsior cutter — and shipped it out. A surviving trade catalog held at Rutgers, titled “American saw mill machinery,” lists the firm as a maker of “saws, mainly for lumber mill work.” The works were in Hackettstown; the company’s sales offices were in New York City. By one industry account, it was the country’s largest maker of circular sawmills in the 1920s.

Around 1951 — one local history instead puts it at 1955 — Bergen Machine & Tool Company took over the roughly 100,000-square-foot plant. Bergen’s documented specialty was concrete-block machinery and the molds that went with it. It ran the Main Street works for about half a century, and local recollections still name people who worked there.

Bergen left for Mountain Top, Pennsylvania, in 2003, and the building sat empty. In 2011 a broken water line weakened its beams and part of it collapsed; a new owner bought the property that June for a reported $1.1 million and, over preservation objections, had it demolished.

The town had marked the site an area in need of redevelopment back in 1998. A CVS pharmacy, approved in 2013, was built on the corner parcel; a 2022 redevelopment plan set aside the rest for retail and 108 homes.