It was a good run, but now it is the end of a era. The Ford Rander will be no more. The last Ford Ranger was built on Friday Dec 16, 2011 at the St. Paul plant in Minnesota. It was all white and going to a pest control company.

The Ford plant in Minnesota ended an 86 year run. It is located on the Mississippi river in St. Paul and started building the Model T there back in 1925.

It was 2008 when Ford first announced that the plant would be closing. The economy was bad. Laid-offs every where you looked. There were no good paying jobs anywhere. Now there is another 800 people looking for work and it is right before the holidays. Which means that they will not receive there first unemployment check for about three weeks.

Ford introduced the Ford Ranger back in 1982. Small pickups from Japan were doing very well and Ford wanted to get a piece of the pie. The Ranger was on top in 1995 when things were going good. Sales have slump since for the small pickup. People have been looking at the bigger pickups now because of better gas mileage.

With the closing of the plant, nearly 800 jobs are now gone, down from more then 2,000 at the plant's peak in the 1970s, Minnesota has lost nearly one-quarter of its 400,000 manufacturing jobs since the late '90s. St.Paul mayor Chris Coleman said at the plants gates "It's a sad day for St. Paul".

Dallas Theis was the lucky person to drive the last Ford Ranger out to the stockyard. Theis started working at the Ford plant when Eisenhower was president and phone numbers were only four numbers long. That was back in 1958, when his pay was $1.98 an hour. He is 76 now and will retire.

Amid cheers and flashes from workers camera phones, the last white Ford Ranger rolled off the sidewinder line Friday morning with a rose in its bed. An automatic garage door flung open and 53-year employee Dallas Theis drove the little pick-up out of the Twin Cities Assembly Plant.

The Ford Plant will be torn down next year. There are no plans as of now what will go up in place of the plant. Something to watch I think, would be the fact that there will be pieces of the plant a person could buy. Keep watching the news for upcoming news related to the old Ford Ranger Plant.