Six founders, a partnership and a turn to refrigeration.

York takes its name from the town where it began. According to the company history in the International Directory of Company Histories (St. James Press, 1996), the York Manufacturing Co. was founded in York, Pennsylvania, in the autumn of 1874 by six men. It became a partnership in 1885, the same history says, the year the company built its first ice machine, for a customer in Mississippi. At the time, it adds, people in the northern states were generally content with ice cut from frozen rivers and lakes in winter, but York kept developing ways to make and store ice by machine.

Refrigeration soon took over the works. The Directory says that by 1897 ice making and refrigeration made up York’s product lines, and that every other line had been sold or discontinued. Overseas sales came early: York sold products in Japan from 1898, the history says, though it did not open its first office in Europe until 1923, in London.

The move from cold storage to cooled air followed in stages. The same history dates York’s first link between refrigeration and industrial air conditioning to 1903, when it installed a system to dehumidify blast-furnace air at a factory run by the Carnegie Steel Co. In 1914 it air-conditioned the Empire Theatre in Montgomery, Alabama, and in 1923 it supplied air conditioning for an office building of the San Joaquin Light and Power Co. in Fresno, California. In 1927, the Directory says, the company was reincorporated in Delaware together with affiliated companies and renamed the York Ice Machinery Corp.; in 1942 it became the York Corp. During the mid-1920s it built a single-room air conditioner and sold commercial units under the Yorkaire line, and by the mid-1930s it had a second plant near York and offices in dozens of American and foreign cities.

Borg-Warner, a spin-off and two new owners.

The middle of the twentieth century brought York’s first change of ownership. The International Directory of Company Histories says that Borg-Warner Corp., the Chicago manufacturer best known for automotive parts, acquired York in 1956, and that York became a Borg-Warner division. Before that, it says, York had introduced automatic ice makers for hotels, restaurants and hospitals in 1948, hermetically sealed cooling circuits for room air conditioners in 1950 and heat pumps for year-round use in the early 1950s, and had manufacturing in several American cities and in Nottingham, England. Under Borg-Warner, one new product of 1961 was the Sunline rooftop air conditioner, which the history describes as taking up no interior space and having a low silhouette. Work on a plant in Madisonville, Kentucky began in October 1972, a new York heat pump was in production in 1977, and in 1981 York acquired the air-conditioning division of Westinghouse Electric Corp.

Independence came next. The Directory says that Borg-Warner spun the unit off to its shareholders in 1986 as the York International Corp., with a management group led by the former helicopter designer Stanley Hiller Jr. The new company bought Bristol Compressors, a maker of hermetic compressors, and the industrial refrigeration businesses Frick Industrial and Frigid Coil/Frick. It went private in 1988, when an investor group headed by Citicorp Capital Investors bought it, and returned to the stock market in October 1991. In 1994, the history says, York’s residential products were sold under the York, Luxaire, Fraser-Johnston, Moncrief, Homeair and Bristol trademarks, its commercial equipment under names including York, Luxaire and Tempmaster, and its industrial refrigeration under names including York, Frick and Frigid Coil. That year the company’s headquarters and its main manufacturing site were both in York.

The ownership that shapes the brand today dates from 2005. English Wikipedia, citing Contracting Business and ACHR News, says the York brand has been owned by Johnson Controls since 2005, and that York International is the final name of the company that started in York in 1874. Johnson Controls itself merged with Tyco International in 2016 and is now headquartered in Cork, Ireland, according to the same article. In July 2024, Reuters reported that Johnson Controls would sell a heating and ventilation business to the Bosch Group.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are all names found on heating and air-conditioning equipment: furnaces, air conditioners, heat pumps and rooftop units. Heating and air-conditioning brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from names sold mainly through local installers to names that belong to large building-technology groups.

A heating or cooling brand’s identity is usually carried less by one product than by a name on a metal cabinet, a badge on a grille and a colour on a truck. The company behind that name may have been sold, merged, split or licensed to another owner, and the plants where the equipment is made may have changed more than once. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its equipment is actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its equipment is made and how its marks have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

One name, two companies and two Midwestern plants.

Since the summer of 2025 the York name has worked for two companies at once. Bosch said in a release dated 1 August 2025, reproduced by the trade magazine PHCP Pros, that it had completed the purchase of the residential and light commercial heating, ventilation and air-conditioning business of Johnson Controls, together with the Johnson Controls-Hitachi Air Conditioning joint venture, on 31 July 2025. Its home-comfort brands, Bosch said, now include “YORK® in the USA and Hitachi in Asia,” and it is “acquiring long-term licenses to use the brand names for YORK and Hitachi.” Johnson Controls, for its part, still lists YORK among its own brands for HVAC equipment and for industrial refrigeration, alongside names such as Frick and Sabroe.

Where the residential equipment is made is set out on English Wikipedia, which describes two Johnson Controls plants in the United States: Wichita, Kansas, which it says mainly produces residential air conditioners, furnaces and heat pumps for the North American market under brands including York and Coleman, citing Manufacturing Today in 2017; and Norman, Oklahoma, which mainly produces rooftop units for commercial buildings, citing a Johnson Controls release from 2019. The Bosch release names the same two towns as the American manufacturing sites it gained in the 2025 deal.

On the page and on the equipment, the name is the identity. Both Johnson Controls’ brand list and the Bosch release set it in capitals, “YORK”, the same short word that has stood for the company since the York Manufacturing Co. took its name from a Pennsylvania town in 1874. For a design guide, York shows how a place name can outlive several owners and end up shared between them, carried by a single capitalised word on furnaces, rooftop units and chillers. Compare it with the American air-conditioning houses Carrier and Trane. For this guide we use navy, ice blue and galvanised grey with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep York’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.