For 50 years, Wixom built Lincolns — then the line went quiet

Just before 1 p.m. on May 31, 2007, a white Lincoln Town Car rolled off the line in Wixom, and the workers watching it knew it was the last one. Fifty years, more than six and a half million cars, and then nothing — the lights went down on one of the biggest assembly plants Ford ever ran.

When the plant opened on April 15, 1957, Wixom was a small rural place west of Detroit, the kind of spot you drove through. The factory built the town around itself. Thousands of jobs arrived, and behind them came the subdivisions, schools, and storefronts that steady paychecks tend to pull in. This was no ordinary stamping shop, either — Wixom was Ford’s luxury and specialty house. Lincoln Continentals and Town Cars, the Ford Thunderbird, even the low-slung Ford GT supercar in its final years all came together here.

Then tastes turned. America stopped buying enormous luxury sedans, Lincoln’s numbers slid, and gas prices climbed. Ford put Wixom on its closure list, and the plant ran out its string in the spring of 2007. The buildings came down a few years later, and the long stretch of land hugging I-96 has been carved up and redeveloped — solar arrays, distribution, a different century’s idea of what a big industrial site is for.

For families who grew up here, the plant is woven into the photo albums: the parent or grandparent who clocked in for thirty years and retired with a Town Car of their own in the driveway. It is the most Michigan of stories — a town conjured by one giant employer, and what it has to figure out when that employer packs up and leaves.