This 1938 dealer license plate is among my favorites due to its ties to an iconic Seattle company.

Overshadowed a bit by Boeing’s prominence, the Kenworth Truck Company has been a manufacturing fixture in Seattle since its founding in 1923.  Prior to its 1945 move into a modern factory near Boeing Field, Kenworth trucks and buses were built in small brick buildings on Mercer Street in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood.

Finished trucks and buses driven on the road for marketing, testing, or demonstration required licensing.  Today, companies producing vehicles for sale are assigned Manufacturer license plates, in Washington and elsewhere, but prior to 1973 this classification did not exist in Washington.  Instead, the Kenworth Truck Company was classified as a motor vehicle dealer, and accordingly was issued Dealer license plates for its vehicles.

Washington Dealer license plates

Dealer license plates in Washington have been issued using the same methodology since 1924.  A dealership pays to obtain a dealer license, and is assigned a company number.  The company can then order as many license plates as it requires for its vehicle fleet, with each plate receiving a letter suffix, beginning with “A” for the first plate, “B” for the second, and so on.  Kenworth was assigned dealer number 303, and photos through the decades show Dealer 303 plates in use on its vehicles. The “U” suffix on my 1938 plate indicates this was the 21^st plate assigned to the company that year. 

A Factory in South Lake Union

At the time this plate was issued, Kenworth was producing vehicles in its small brick factory on the corner of Yale and Mercer in Seattle.  Unlike so many other buildings in the South Lake Union area, it miraculously has survived well into the 21^st century, having narrowly escaped destruction in the 1960s when the Mercer offramp from Interstate 5 was built a block to the north. 

The company vacated the building in 1945, moving south to a large modern factory near Boeing on East Marginal Way.  Shortly afterwards, the Epcon Zeon Electrical Products company moved in.  In a happy coincidence, I was lucky to find this framed photograph of the building in an antiques store, taken not long after Kenworth closed shop in the building.

Kenworth continued to use dealer license plates numbered 303 until the Manufacturer vehicle class was introduced in 1973. The ad from the Seattle Times below prominently features a bus with 1948 Washington dealer plate, number 303 K.

I especially love license plates that have direct ties to Seattle or Northwest history, especially its industrial history. Please contact me if you have any interest in learning more about license plates, or have anything interesting to share about the Kenworth Truck Company’s early history in Seattle.