Founded in 1965 The Museum opened as a private collection in 1965 in a building about two blocks away from our current collection. Our founders were Paul and Erminie Hafer. Paul was the president of the Boyertown Auto Body Works, manufacturer of custom commercial truck bodies. He and his wife Erminie were dedicated to preserving the craftsmanship of locally built vehicles. They also very much wanted their Museum, which they later turned into a nonprofit in order to preserve the collection for future generations, to be located in buildings that once were part of our transportation heritage. That original Museum building was a part of the Boyertown Auto Body Works but no longer used in manufacturing. In 1990, when the Boyertown Auto Body Works closed for good, the building located at Walnut and Third Streets was renovated and became the new permanent home of the Boyertown Museum of Historic Vehicles in the year 2000.As part of this move in 2000, the Museum could now include the original 1872 Jeremiah Sweinhart Carriage Factory. This building is where vehicle building began in Boyertown. The carriage factory, which went through several name and owner changes, was in continuous operation from 1872 until 1926, and grew in size several times. In 1926, the Boyertown Carriage Works was purchased by three gentlemen and the business changed to commerical truck body production (though in 1914, the Boyertown Carriage Works started to build truck bodies as they saw the writing on the wall that the motorized age was upon us). Paul Hafer's father was one of those three gentlemen who transformed the company into the Boyertown Auto Body Works, and Paul started out here as an engineer.We are very fortunate to have a Museum where part of the collection was manufactured in the very spaces where they are displayed—visitors are walking in the footsteps of the craftspeople and laborers who built the carriages and trucks in front of them.
