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Wire and cable · Essex Group / Essex International / Superior Essex
On the record
Founded (company): 1930, Detroit, Michigan, strong. The Superior Essex company history and the company’s SEC filings agree: Addison E. Holton established Essex Wire Corp. in Detroit in 1930, producing battery cables and wiring harnesses for the Ford Model A from leased space in Ford’s Highland Park plant. This is a Fort Wayne plant entry, not a Fort Wayne founding — Essex was not a Dudlo spin-off, and any account treating it as one is misidentified (entry 22).
Fort Wayne arrival: 1936, strong. Essex acquired the vacant former Dudlo Manufacturing plant on Wall Street in Fort Wayne in 1936 (company history; News-Sentinel agrees). Headquarters move — CONFLICT carried unresolved: the company history gives headquarters relocated to Fort Wayne in 1954 (with Walter F. Probst succeeding Holton as president in 1958); the News-Sentinel says the company “moved its headquarters from Detroit to Fort Wayne 30 years later” than 1936 — i.e. c.1966; a third datum records that in 1982 Essex announced a $3 million investment in its Fort Wayne facility “which would become the company’s world headquarters,” completed 1984. All three statements are carried, none silently preferred. The company’s principal executive offices were at 1601 Wall Street, Fort Wayne in its 1995 Form 10-K (SEC filing).
Founder: Addison E. Holton, World War I Navy veteran (company history). He retired in 1962 and died in 1980, aged 83.
What it did: in Fort Wayne, magnet wire at the former Dudlo plant — joining Rea and Phelps Dodge (Inca) to make Fort Wayne the magnet-wire centre — within a much wider company making wire harnesses, battery cables, building wire (the Paranite brand), wire and cable, controls and engineered products. In World War II Essex produced magnet wire for the transformers used by America and its allies, field telephone wire for the Army Signal Corps and harnesses for B-24 bombers, and was awarded the War Department “E” Award (company literature, via the company history as company literature).
Course and fate: rapid national growth from the Fort Wayne base — sales $355 million by 1965, seven divisions, 41 plants, NYSE listing that year; operating as Essex International Inc. by 1970 with 25,700 employees; a new 30,000 sq ft Metal Products facility built in Fort Wayne in 1968; sales about $845 million in 1973 with about 100 plants (all company history). Absorbed repeatedly: merged into United Technologies in 1974; bought out of United Technologies in 1988 by MS/Essex Holdings and private thereafter; Bessemer Holdings 1992; public again 1997; acquired by Superior TeleCom in a deal announced September 1998 and finalised 1999 ($1.4 billion), forming Superior Essex, then North America’s largest wire and cable maker. By the 2008 SEC filings Superior Essex’s principal executive offices were at 150 Interstate North Parkway, Atlanta, Georgia; the exact year the headquarters left Fort Wayne is not established on sources in hand. LS Cable (Korea) acquired Superior Essex in 2008 for about $900 million. Fort Wayne work continued after the headquarters left: in 2009 the company consolidated distribution into a 200,000 sq ft Fort Wayne facility and opened an 80,000 sq ft Essex Brownell manufacturing operation in Fort Wayne. No Fort Wayne closure is in hand; the fate is therefore headquarters departed, operation continuing — not “closed.”
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- § 05 — business
Sources: Superior Essex company history, via Reference for Business — https://www.referenceforbusiness.com/history2/85/Superior-Essex-Inc.html ; same history, via Encyclopedia.com — https://www.encyclopedia.com/books/politics-and-business-magazines/superior-essex-inc ; Frazier, News-Sentinel — http://egen.fortwayne.com/ns/projects/history/2000/1910/ind6.php ; Essex Group Form 10-K, fiscal 1995, via SEC — http://pdf.secdatabase.com/2417/0000033565-96-000005.pdf ; Superior Essex Form 8-K, Aug 2008, via SEC — http://pdf.secdatabase.com/220/0001104659-08-051787.pdf ; LS Cable / Superior Essex joint release, 11 June 2008, via SEC — https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1271193/000089882208000675/exhibit991.htm ; Trade & Industry Development, 2009 — https://www.tradeandindustrydev.com/industry/manufacturing/news/superior-essex-expand-manufacturing-operation-2013 . Sources as cited in the profile.