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THE 1850S SHIFT · BASS AND THE PENNSY SHOPS
Two plants, one system: Fort Wayne's industrial revolution begins, in the record, with two ironworks facing each other across the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago tracks. The site on the north side was first developed in 1853 by the blacksmiths John and Charles Cooper, bought in 1854 by Sion Bass, and sold in 1857 to the newly formed Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago Railroad — Samuel Hanna having donated land for the anticipated shops as early as 1852 and pressed the road to choose Fort Wayne for them. Those became the Pennsy Shops: the line's place for designing, building, testing and repairing locomotives and cars, enlarged by the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1882, 1903 and 1918, and for nearly fifty years, from the Civil War until just after 1900, one of the most important railroad shop complexes in the nation — local pride called the city the "Altoona of the West." Across the tracks, the firm founded in 1853 as Jones, Bass & Company passed in 1862 to John H. Bass alone and grew, on Civil War demand, into the Bass Foundry and Machine Works, making the car wheels and axles the shops consumed. The firms' full histories are in the Business section; what matters here is the form: for the first time, Fort Wayne work meant a plant, a whistle, a payroll, and a product — rolling stock — sold to a national system.
The numbers, as the sources give them: The shop complex employed over one thousand men at one time in its early decades, by the National Register nomination's account, and 3,950 workers by 1913, by John F. Bonsib's 1979 Quest Club paper as cited in David Steiner's industry history. Griswold's 1907 birdseye summary put the railroad shops' employment at 3,000 and the Bass Foundry's at 1,200. For the foundry itself the figures conflict by date and source and are not merged: the News-Sentinel, quoting the Fort Wayne Gazette of 1 January 1888, gives 1,100 men and a monthly payroll of $35,000 "at one time," while Griswold's 1917 biographical sketch gives an average of 2,500 men and an annual payroll of $1,500,000. A popular saying, repeated in Michael Hawfield's 1994 News-Sentinel history, held that John Bass employed one of every four people in Fort Wayne and that "trains kept America rolling, and Fort Wayne kept the trains rolling" — a saying, carried here as a saying; the counted figures above are the record. The foundry was, on the News-Sentinel's characterization, the world's leading manufacturer of railroad wheels and the city's biggest industry at the turn of the century. The shops outlasted locomotive building — Fort Wayne ceased making locomotives after the First World War, rebuilding ended in 1933, passenger-car work continued — until the last railroad operations closed in 1953; the property was abandoned by 1966 and the roundhouse, the last vestige, razed in 1984. The foundry closed after the Second World War.
Sources: National Register nomination, Pennsylvania Railroad Station (Baker Street Station), Statement of Significance (the 1857 choice of Fort Wayne, the Cooper–Bass site, the expansions, production and decline dates); ACGSI, Railroad History of Fort Wayne (Hanna's 1852 donation, the 1853 Cooper shop, the 1857 sale, the closing dates); Steiner, "Trends in Industry in Allen County," Quest Club paper (3,950 shop workers by 1913, citing Bonsib 1979); Griswold's 1907 birdseye view figures as reprinted by the Polk directory and World Maps Online (shops 3,000, Bass 1,200); the Business section's Bass Foundry entry (the Gazette 1888 figures, Griswold 1917, and the Hawfield saying).