The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1868–1930 AND 1972–PRESENT · BOUNDARY FIRST, THEN THE TOWNSHIP TEST
The floor pattern refuses a merged “manufacturing abroad” and so does this article: each industry gets its own lines. The county’s export industries are South Bend’s, and they print first at boundary size. The plowmaker to the world. James Oliver’s South Bend works — 300,000 plows a year at the peak, sales spread internationally under the slogan the record preserves, “Plowmaker of the World” — carries the single largest foreign order in the county’s farm record. In August 1930, on a week’s notice, Oliver’s Charles City tractor plant demonstrated the new 28-44 for a Russian delegation escorted by the company’s president, Cal Sivright; the demonstration, in the words of the account preserved in Farm Collector from Elmer Baker Jr.’s Implement & Tractor column of 21 October 1963, quoting tractor-engine manager George Bird, “went off without a hitch; and before the day was over, the Russians signed an order for 5,000 Oliver tractors along with a big order for Oliver plows, cultivators, and combines.” The buyer was Amtorg, the Soviet trading corporation in New York (founded 1924); the combines were the Nichols & Shepard division’s Model F prairie-type machines, then the largest in North America. The account’s own verdict prints with it: “Russia and Oliver saved each other.” The order was an Oliver Corporation order across its divisions — Charles City tractors, Battle Creek combines, South Bend plows and cultivators — and no part of it was made in Clay or Harris township. Cabinets for the world’s sewing machines. Singer’s South Bend cabinet factory, established 1868 on the East Race and moved in 1901 to the Western Avenue site, was at that date the largest sewing-machine cabinet factory in the world; the Discover Indiana record gives the peak: 1,500 workers producing 5,000 cabinets a day, employment peaking in 1914 at 3,000 workers and an estimated two million cabinets that year, with the South Bend works serving “as a model for Singer’s other locations around the world, like its duplicate in Moscow which supplied cabinets to their Russian, Balkan, and Japanese markets.” Cabinet production was concentrated at South Bend within Singer’s worldwide system, supported by timber operations including the Thurso sawmill in Canada. The cable orders of 1914. Those are Studebaker’s, and the firm’s own history is the source: Albert Russell Erskine’s History of the Studebaker Corporation records that shortly after the outbreak of war in August 1914 the English government, “which had used Studebaker wagons in the Boer War, placed a cable order with the corporation for 3,000 transport wagons selected from its catalog, which order was filled in six weeks,” followed by orders for 20,000 sets of six-horse English artillery harness and 60,000 artillery saddles — “probably the largest single order of its kind ever placed” — completed in sixteen weeks against a twenty-week contract, and by “large orders for vehicles, harness and automobiles from the French and Russian governments.”
Then the township test, run firm by firm over the banked businesses roll, with each firm’s own published record as the source class. Triangle Truss (1972–1976, the first manufacturer seated on this ground, by Big C Lumber’s own timeline): a truss plant building for the subdivisions rising around it; no sale beyond the local building trade appears in the company timeline or any record reached — none claimed. Big C Lumber (headquarters 50860 Princess Way, Granger): sixteen yards across Indiana, Michigan and Ohio on the banked account, fifteen retail yards plus manufacturing facilities on the company’s own about page — every location domestic; tested in full at the next article. Drive and Shine (headquarters 16915 Cleveland Road, Granger): twenty-plus washes across Indiana, Michigan and Ohio; its own FAQ states, “We have no plans to franchise” — the company’s foreign footprint is nil by its own word. Anchor Construction (7121 Grape Road, Granger): design-build projects in more than forty states on its own site, whose support claim is expressly “nationwide” and whose project narratives reached are all United States work. Bare Hands Brewery (12804 Sandy Court, Granger, opened December 2011): a production brewery of taproom scale in every directory reached; no distribution beyond the region, foreign or otherwise, is claimed by any listing. The Microsoft EKI campus (12501 Cleveland Road) is a data-centre build, not a goods exporter, and the banked businesses leg carries it whole as a land transaction. Result of the firm-by-firm test: no Granger-seated firm returns a foreign sale in its own record or the trade press reached. The export industries of the county stand four named articles deep across the line in South Bend, and on this ground the row is a tested negative, printed as one.
Sources: Farm Collector, “Oliver and the USSR” (the Amtorg order, the August 1930 demonstration, Bird’s and Baker’s words as quoted); Oliver Corporation records via the Lilly Library finding aid (the 1929 merger forming Oliver Farm Equipment Co.); James Oliver biographical record (“Plowmaker of the World”; 300,000 plows a year); Discover Indiana / The History Museum, South Bend, Singer Sewing Machine Factory entry (1868 founding; 1901 largest in the world; 1914 peak; the Moscow duplicate and its markets); Singer factory survey (cabinet production concentrated at South Bend; Thurso, Canada timber); Erskine, History of the Studebaker Corporation (the August 1914 cable order and following orders, quoted); Big C Lumber, Drive and Shine, and Anchor Construction company publications as carried in the banked businesses leg and re-read.