Harley-Davidson Motorcycles Shop

Ernesto Cerini was born on July 13, 1893, in Arezzo, a small village in the province of Tuscany in Italy on his grandfather’s farm to a wine merchant father and a mother who died when he was young. An only child, he had no formal education. As a youth, Ernesto became interested in mechanics and repairing bicycles, a popular mode of transportation in the Italian countryside and throughout Europe during that time.

In 1909 at the age of 16, Ernesto immigrated to the United States and settled in Monessen, Pennsylvania. To make money, Ernesto worked in the nearby Monessen Tin Plate Works (Tin Mill) that was started by William H. Donner who helped found Donora. While working in the Tin Mill, he brought tin to be sorted to a fellow Italian immigrant named Oliva Sylvesti (Sylvester) who worked as a tin sorter, a common job for a woman in that mill. A courtship developed and Ernesto and Oliva would marry.

Ernesto or Ernest as he would be known, would open his own bicycle shop in nearby Donora because there weren’t any like there were in Monessen and Charleroi. The shop was located in an old schoolhouse (possibly the Gilmore schoolhouse) on Meldon Avenue (possibly at 1380) in the north end of Donora. When Ernest’s interest in motorcycles increased beyond his bicycle business, he took the next step in 1919 when Harley-Davidson opened a mechanics school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and he attended the second class of that year.


In 1920, Ernest would acquire a Harley-Davidson dealership and try his hand at selling and repairing motorcycles, and Ernest Cerini Harley-Davidson was born. At the time, this would be the second family-owned Harley-Davidson Dealership in the United States, the first being the Dudley Perkins Company in San Francisco, California founded in 1914. Ernest moved his business to 1405 Meldon Avenue in 1921 and then moved again in 1925 when he built the present-day building at 1507 Meldon Avenue where the store