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1954–1981 · THE TOWNSHIP WHOLE
Granger's commercial era begins, as its parish history happens to document, with a land developer's arithmetic: in 1954 Kenneth Zook of Zook Realty of Elkhart donated the five-acre St. Pius X site on Fir Road while planning 270 homes within the parish bounds — the first hard number of the subdivision era in this record. Zook was an outside firm planting a suburb, and the pattern held for decades: the builders of Granger's subdivisions were seated in Elkhart, South Bend, and Mishawaka, and the commerce they created was construction itself — plats, lots, and houses — followed at a distance by retail that waited for the rooftops to thicken. Through the 1960s and 1970s the CDP-to-be had subdivisions, schools, and churches before it had a shopping center; its residents' grocery and department-store trade still ran south to Mishawaka's Grape Road and McKinley corridors.
The ground's first industrial seat arrived inside that interval, on the site that anchors this section's next entry: Triangle Truss was founded in 1972 at the site of the present Big C Lumber location in Granger — a truss-manufacturing operation planted in farm country to build the very subdivisions rising around it — and lasted until 1976, by the lumber company's own published timeline. It is the first manufacturer the record seats on this ground, and it was a construction supplier: Granger's first industry made pieces of Granger's houses. The retail turn itself, when it came, came on State Road 23 at the township's southern edge, and it is carried node by node in the entries that follow.
Sources:
- St. Pius X parish history (Zook Realty donation, 1954; 270 homes planned in the parish bounds), as carried in the Story of Granger section of this build.
- Big C Lumber Co., "Our History" timeline (bigclumber.com): Triangle Truss founded at the current Granger site, 1972, lasting until 1976.