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Patterns, aluminum casting, heat treating and machining · Ward Corporation
On the record
Founded: 18 May 1964, Fort Wayne, strong. The company’s own history timeline states the day: “May 18th, 1964 — Marion and Vern Ward opened the doors of WARD Pattern & Engineering Company as a small pattern shop with three employees and 1,500 sq. ft.,” with first-year sales of $90,000. The Journal Gazette’s 2018 profile of the founders agrees the Wards “started their business in 1964,” and the company’s current brochure agrees. No incorporation record was retrieved, so the exact day rests on the company history and is not proven. The conflict is settled here: a Facebook comment carried on ACGSI’s Wayne Knitting Mills page claims “in the late 1940’s the Ward Aluminum Company began operation at that site.” That is misidentified — Wayne Knitting Mills operated at the Growth Avenue site until 1960 (entry 29), Ward was not founded until 1964, and Ward Aluminum did not exist until 1978. Site occupancy has been conflated with founding.
Founders: Marion Ward and Vern Ward (company timeline; the 1983 city bond application below names Marion Ward as president and Vern Ward as vice-president of Ward Aluminum Castings, Inc.). The Journal Gazette profiled the couple in 2018, then in their 90s and still involved with the firm.
What it did: a pattern shop — Ward Pattern & Engineering made the patterns and tooling from which foundry castings are produced — begun in 1,500 sq ft of the former Wayne Knitting Mills building on Growth Avenue. The casting side arrived in two documented steps: in 1969 Marion’s brother Gail Cole started an aluminum foundry, Cole Precision Castings, making prototype and short-run sand castings; in 1978 Ward Aluminum Casting, Inc. was formed by assuming the assets and liabilities of Cole Precision Castings, by then grown to 40 employees and 15,000 sq ft. The company’s two dates therefore reconcile, and are not a conflict: the brochure’s “providing aluminum castings since 1978” dates the aluminum casting business; 1964 dates the firm. A 1983 city record independently fits the 1978 date: Ward Aluminum Castings’ application in Fort Wayne Ordinance R-83-09-35 states the applicant had been in operation in Allen County for 5 years as a contemporaneous city record.
Course: growth by buildings and divisions, per the company timeline: in 1980 Ward bought the previously rented three-story, 120,000 sq ft building at 642 Growth Avenue (Building #1), housing both Ward Pattern and Ward Aluminum Casting. Additions followed in 1984–85, including the purchase of the 130,000 sq ft warehouse at 641 Growth Avenue (Building #2), permanent molding added to the sand-casting operation, and casting machining brought in-house. In 1986–89 Ward Production Machine became a separate division and Ward Heat Treat was built as a 25,000 sq ft facility four miles north of the main plant. In 1999–2001 the company bought the 100,000 sq ft building at 730 Growth Avenue (Building #4) and received ISO 9002 / QS-9000 certification. It survived the 2008–09 recession and, on its own account, doubled sales from 2008 to 2014.
Fate: still operating, family-owned, in Fort Wayne. Ward Corporation today comprises four divisions — Ward Pattern & Engineering, Ward Aluminum Casting, Ward Heat Treating and Ward Production Machine — at 642 Growth Avenue, with, on the company’s current brochure, over 250 employees across the four divisions and over 300,000 sq ft of manufacturing space. Flagged and not followed: an unclaimed ThomasNet profile carries “company is out of business / no longer at this location” flags; those flags conflict with the company’s own current brochure and listings and are not established against them — an unclaimed-profile status flag is not a closure record.
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- § 05 — business
Sources: Ward Corporation company history timeline, via Glassdoor — https://www.glassdoor.com/Overview/Working-at-Ward-EI_IE1314491.11,this history ; Ward Corporation current brochure — https://online.flipbuilder.com/dvak/qnbg/files/basic-html/page7.html ; Journal Gazette, Janet Patterson, 9 Sept 2018, as summarised on ACGSI — https://www.acgsi.org/genweb/fort-wayne/wayne-knitting-mills-fort-wayne-indiana.html ; City of Fort Wayne Ordinance R-83-09-35 (1983) — https://archive.org/download/FWCityCouncil-Ordinance-R-83-09-35/FWCityCouncil-Ordinance-R-83-09-35.pdf ; Ward Corporation vendor listing — https://www.ndt.org/vendor.asp?ObjectID=46881 . Sources as cited in the profile.