How Trek Bicycle began in 1976 in Waterloo, WI

Born in a barn

The story of Trek's first home

Bevil Hogg spent the winter of 1975 driving through southern Wisconsin, looking for a place to grow this new venture. A business was forming now, and it was an entirely new shape: not retail, but a wholly owned subsidiary of Roth Corporation, funded by $100,000 in seed money secured by Dick Burke. They had a plan. What they needed was a space, industrial space, where they could turn the idea of American-made bicycles into something real.

Waterloo was a town of barely three thousand people — a bank, a church, a feed mill, and more taverns than seemed mathematically possible. There was a pickle factory and a printing plant that published Playboy Magazine, proofs of which were rumored to end up at the taverns a day before the rest of the world. It was a mill-town, a union town, and, though no one knew it yet, a town destined to become world-famous for bicycles.

Off Main Street, he found a building that hardly qualified as a factory. A weathered, dilapidated, red pole barn that had once stored carpet rolls — 7,000 square feet of cracked concrete, peeling paint, and light coming through the slats in the walls, with an active rail line rumbling just a few feet away.

The air inside was biting. Years later, an early builder would remember snow drifting under the barn doors. But in its own way, it was perfect.

The barn sat halfway between Bevil’s home in Madison and Dick’s office in Milwaukee. Dick liked the practicality. It was economical, removed yet close enough to supervise from a distance. To both men, it might have felt like neutral ground.

Bevil would later say they chose the barn because it was the only choice: “There were no empty industrial buildings in rural Wisconsin. Nothing. This was it.”

But a barn is more than a building. It is a beginning, a life-giving place, a place where things get better with time. Humble on the outside, ambitious within. It may have been their only option, but it was the right one.

In the months that followed, Bevil would gather a small group of craftsmen in Waterloo. “Crazy cowboys,” he recalled, “who designed and built their own bicycles.” Some were already builders. Others would become them.

It was chaotic, creative, and gloriously imperfect. There were parties and skinny-dipping in the summer, smoke curling out of the barn that wasn’t always from cigarettes. It was the 1970s, and these were artists.

But for now, the barn was still quiet. A shell waiting to be filled. Maybe Dick and Bevil stood together in the doorway, staring into an empty space that already felt full of possibility.

It was the middle of nowhere and the beginning of everything. In that barn between Milwaukee and Madison, something big was happening.

And it was something they had to name.