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SCALE COMPLETED · 1923 TO 1979
Harvester: In 1923 International Harvester built its Fort Wayne Works on the east side — a truck plant the city's historians price at five million dollars, projected at the choosing to employ 4,000 to 5,000 — and for sixty years the plant was the transformation's largest single fact. It built 1,527,299 medium and heavy trucks before it closed, passed its millionth truck in 1963, made the Scout from 1960 to 1980, and gave the city its trade name, the heavy-duty truck capital of the world — a name in the truck press and the Homecoming literature, carried here as the name it was. Employment ran to nearly 9,000 by the end of the 1960s and peaked, on John Beatty's figure as carried in the News-Sentinel's history, at 10,600 in 1979. ACGSI's account attaches a nearly identical figure — more than 10,500 — to the plant's Second World War peak instead. The two figures stand unreconciled, attached to their sources and their different eras; what neither disputes is the order of magnitude: a single works employing on the order of ten thousand. The plant's full record, and the wartime production that ran through it, are in the Business section and the Wars section respectively.
The war plants and the city's maximum: The Second World War took the factory city to its ceiling: about 20,000 at General Electric in 1944, Harvester building trucks and wartime vehicles at its own peak rate, Magnavox and the Farnsworth succession making electronics for the services — the details are in the Wars section — and the population followed the payrolls: 118,410 in 1940, 133,607 in 1950, 161,776 in 1960, 178,269 in 1970. In 1960 the magnet wire cluster was producing, on the figure the city's histories repeat, nearly 90 percent of North America's magnet wire. Durable-goods manufacturing still provided 31 percent of all area employment in 1970, long after the national share had fallen away. Fort Wayne had become, completely, the thing the railroad shops of 1857 had promised: a city whose weather was made in its factories.
Sources: the Business section's International Harvester entry and ACGSI's Harvester pages (the 1923 plant, the 1,527,299 trucks, the closing dates); News-Sentinel, "1980–1989" history and Input Fort Wayne's museum account, both drawing on Beatty, History of Fort Wayne & Allen County (the five-million-dollar plant and its projected employment, the millionth truck of 1963, the late-1960s ~9,000, the 1979 peak of 10,600); Whatzup, on the Harvester Homecoming (the "heavy-duty truck capital" name); U.S. decennial census (the population series 1940–1970); Crouch (1986) (the 31 percent durable-goods share of 1970).