The Jenney works and the General Electric century

1881 – 2015

The founding: The works began as a hometown company. The Fort Wayne Jenney Electric Light Company was organised in 1881 by Ranald T. McDonald — the developers who later revived the campus spelled the name MacDonald, and both spellings stand in the record — to manufacture the arc lamp and small dynamo of inventor James A. Jenney, whose own entry sits in the Inventors & Inventions section. Jenney's arc system lit an early night baseball game here in June 1883, and the Fort Wayne company built the 155-foot "moonlight towers" that Austin, Texas, bought in 1894 and keeps in part to this day. In 1885 the firm took the Broadway ground that became the permanent works. James J. Wood arrived on 3 December 1890; the "Wood system" of arc lighting bore his name, and he ran the factory into the GE era.

The GE handover, dated three ways: The Thomson-Houston Electric Company bought a controlling interest in 1888 and the firm became the Fort Wayne Electric Company. The panic of 1893 put it in receivership in 1894; a Fort Wayne Electric Corporation succeeded it and folded in 1899, when a new Fort Wayne Electric Works took control. The National Register nomination dates General Electric's acquisition of the company to 1898; John Ankenbruck's history of the city puts the Electric Works takeover in 1899 and the formal merger into the parent company in 1911, with the old identity disappearing by 1916. The dates are printed as their sources give them; what is not in dispute is the outcome — the Broadway campus became a GE works and stayed one for more than a century.

What was made here: Under GE the campus turned from lighting to the apparatus of electrification: alternators, dynamos, transformers, switches, and above all fractional-horsepower motors — the small motors that ran America's appliances. The federal writers' guide to Indiana, in its 1956 revision, called Fort Wayne the home of the world's largest fractional-horsepower motor plant and the world's largest copper wire plant, and counted some thirty factory buildings with 1,610,742 square feet on Broadway alone, plus the Taylor Street plant's 783,462. Refrigeration was a Fort Wayne line from early on: Ankenbruck records that GE developed and began production of refrigeration equipment at the Fort Wayne plant in 1912, and that when the Monitor Top refrigerator was built from 1927 its production went to the Winter Street plant. The National Register nomination credits the plant and its staff with helping to create the first modern refrigerator and the electric garbage disposal; the inventions themselves are carried in the Inventors & Inventions section, and the nomination's wording is printed here as the nomination's claim.

War work and the peak: In 1941 GE built a supercharger plant on Taylor Street — GE turbo-superchargers went into American military aircraft — and the campus worked at war scale. Indiana Landmarks' account puts GE's Fort Wayne employment at 20,000 in 1944, about a third of the city's workforce; the National Register nomination puts the late-1940s peak at roughly forty percent of the city's workforce. Both figures are printed as their sources state them. By 1956 the writers' guide counted about ten thousand employed at peak production — the long plateau after the wartime summit.

The end: Production and employment drained away across the late twentieth century as GE moved work to newer plants. The company's final Fort Wayne jobs were eliminated in 2014, and the 39-acre Broadway complex closed permanently in 2015; GE has no operating plant in Fort Wayne today. The campus was sold in 2017 and redeveloped as the Electric Works innovation district — $286 million in its first phase, and winner of Indiana Landmarks' 2025 Cook Cup — whose full account sits in the Heritage & Preservation section. What GE left behind was not only buildings: it left a workforce and an engineering culture that the rest of this section keeps meeting.

Sources:

1. Greater Chicago Insulator Club newsletter (April 2022), reprinting John Ankenbruck, Twentieth Century History of Fort Wayne (1975) — the 1881 organisation, the 1888 Thomson-Houston purchase, the 1894 receivership, the 1899 Electric Works, the 1911 merger, refrigeration production from 1912, the 1927 Winter Street move, the 1941 Taylor Street supercharger plant, James J. Wood's arrival.
2. National Register of Historic Places listing coverage, General Electric Fort Wayne Electric Works Historic District (2023) — GE's acquisition dated 1898; the peak at roughly forty percent of the city's workforce in the late 1940s; the district's 22 buildings, 1893–1968; "helped create the first modern refrigerator and the electric garbage disposal."
3. Indiana Landmarks — "Innovation Sparks New Use at Fort Wayne Factory" (2021) and the 2025 Cook Cup account: GE employed 20,000 in Fort Wayne in 1944, about one-third of the city's workforce; the closure of Fort Wayne operations in 2015; the 2017 sale; the $286 million first phase.
4. Indiana: A Guide to the Hoosier State (WPA writers' program; 1956 revision) — the world's largest fractional-horsepower motor plant and copper wire plant; the Broadway plant's thirty buildings and floor space; about ten thousand employed at peak production; refrigeration machinery formerly made at Winter and Lanternier streets.
5. Input Fort Wayne (2018) — GE eliminated its final Fort Wayne jobs in 2014.
6. Addie Broyles, "Who built the moontowers?" — the Fort Wayne company's 1894 sale of Austin's moonlight towers.