Dodge Manufacturing — the power-transmission house

1878 – the Mishawaka works' long afterlife runs to 2026

The jack inventor: Wallace Harlow Dodge (1849–1894) was a Mishawaka man — Discover Indiana, the Indiana Historical Society's place-history program, calls him Mishawaka-born — who patented his Magic Jack, a wagon jack of his own invention, and in 1878 founded the Dodge Manufacturing Company in Mishawaka to make it. The Indiana Historical Bureau's marker for the company, erected in 1999 at 500 South Union Street, opens the record the same way: "Wallace Dodge founded company here, 1878 — manufactured 'Magic Wagon Jacks' and wood pulleys." The company's own institutional history, kept today by Dodge Industrial, begins on the same line: "1878 — Wallace Dodge founded Dodge Manufacturing Co. to produce Magic Wagon Jacks." It was a small shop making wooden hardware specialties; within four years it had made the invention that built the fortune.

Fire, and the pulley: The company was incorporated in 1880, by Wallace H. Dodge, William W. Dodge, and George Philion, and moved that year to the Union Street site in south Mishawaka that it would occupy for the rest of its life in the city. In 1881 the little factory burned — struck by lightning, in Discover Indiana's account — uninsured, and was rebuilt at once, on a more substantial plan, in the telling Timothy Howard's 1907 county history and the company history in the Chicago Research Library's digital collection both carry. In 1882 Dodge patented the Independence Wood Split Pulley — 4 July 1882, in the Discover Indiana account — and the pulley changed what the company was. A solid wood pulley had to be ordered for one shaft size and was scrap when the line shafting changed; Dodge's split pulley, built in halves around an interchangeable bushing system, could be stocked in standard sizes, clamped onto any shaft, and moved when the mill rearranged its lines. It made power transmission a catalogue business, and Dodge its catalogue. The company's own timeline still leads with it: "1882 — Introduced the Independence Split Wood Pulley and interchangeable bushing concept." Around it grew the full line Howard's history lists a generation later — iron split pulleys, iron-center wood-rimmed pulleys, safety wood-rim flywheels, split friction clutches, hangers, shafting, and the Eureka water softeners — and, above all, the drive the pulleys served.

Why the pulley mattered: The invention's weight is in the word interchangeable. Before it, a mill's pulleys were effectively part of its building — bored for one shaft, useless on another. Dodge's split pulley, halves bolted around a bushing bored to the shaft at hand, made the pulley a stocked article: a dealer could hold standard sizes, a millwright could mount or move one without pulling the shaft, and a factory could rearrange its lines over a weekend. Discover Indiana's account calls the design revolutionary for exactly this — standardized, interchangeable parts in place of one-off fitting — and the coupling side of the line grew with it: the split friction clutches and shaft couplings of Howard's catalogue let a machine be thrown in or out of the line without stopping the shaft. Transmission stopped being carpentry and became a product line, and the product line's address was Mishawaka.

The rope drive: Dodge's second system was rope. The Dodge American System — the Continuous Wind system of rope transmission, in Howard's naming — drove a factory's line shafts with endless manila ropes running in grooved sheaves, and Dodge became its national promoter. For the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893, Discover Indiana records, Dodge built the largest rope engine yet made, and it powered the fair. The point for Mishawaka is what the rope drive and the pulley together meant: a factory anywhere in America that turned a shaft was a Dodge customer, and the orders came back to Union Street. The plant grew to match. By 1902, in Discover Indiana's account, the works consisted of forty buildings across sixty-five acres.

The Mix era: Wallace Dodge died in September 1894, and the presidency passed to the man who had built the company's selling machine. Melvin W. Mix (born 16 November 1865 at Atlanta, Illinois; died 11 December 1927 at Chicago) had joined Dodge as a shipping clerk in 1886, was made manager of the Chicago sales branch in 1890, returned to Mishawaka as director of sales, and was elected president on Wallace Dodge's death. Howard's 1907 biography of him records that under Mix the business had more than doubled in a decade, and his later biographical record fixes the scale the growth reached: by 1910 the Dodge plant covered sixty acres with twenty-five acres of floor space and was Mishawaka's largest employer, providing employment to more than 1,200 persons. Mix's own Mishawaka holdings beyond Dodge are carried in their own entry below; the presidency he took in 1894 made Dodge a Mix company for a generation, and the branch-office and catalogue system he ran made it a national one.

The twentieth-century line: The company's own timeline carries the product record forward at the dates it gives them: cast-iron pulleys from 1905; the Type C split tapered bearing in 1923; a hand in founding the Mechanical Power Transmission Association and the Conveyor Equipment Manufacturers Association in 1933; the first Taper-Lock bushing in 1939, the bushing system that became an industry standard; the first Type E bearing in 1943; the Dodge School of Transmissioneering in 1944, which trained the trade's engineers in the company's own discipline — the company's headquarters and engineering sat on Union Street with the works through these decades; and entry into gearing with the first Torque-Arm shaft-mount reducer in 1949. The Mishawaka works kept building: the final Dodge building on the Union Street ground was finished in 1965, in Discover Indiana's account. Two years later the independent company's course ended.

The succession, at documented strength: Reliance Electric acquired Dodge Manufacturing in 1967 — the date stands in the trade press's timeline of the Dodge company and in Discover Indiana's account alike. Reliance itself became an Exxon subsidiary in the 1970s (one company-history account dates Exxon's acquisition to 1974; the exact year is not settled in the record reached, and the interval is printed at that strength), so Dodge passed the 1970s and 1980s as a division inside an oil company's electrical business. Rockwell International's acquisition of Reliance was completed on 27 January 1995 at an approximately $1.6 billion purchase price, on Rockwell's own filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; Dodge and Reliance together formed the core of what became Rockwell Automation's Power Systems segment — Rockwell Automation's own acquisition history lists the 1995 Reliance Electric / Dodge purchase with a single parenthetical for its end: "(divested)." On 7 November 2006 Rockwell Automation announced the sale of that Power Systems business — Dodge and Reliance together — to Baldor Electric for $1.8 billion, $1.75 billion in cash and about 1.6 million Baldor shares, for a segment with about $1.0 billion of revenue in the twelve months to 30 September 2006; the sale closed in the first quarter of 2007. ABB acquired Baldor in 2011 for $4.2 billion, and Dodge spent a decade as ABB's Mechanical Power Transmission division. On 26 July 2021 ABB announced the division's sale to RBC Bearings for $2.9 billion in cash — Dodge then carried about 1,500 employees worldwide and about $600 million of revenue in the twelve months to 30 June 2021, more than ninety per cent of it in the Americas, on ABB's own release — and the sale was concluded on 2 November 2021. The Mishawaka inventor's company is today RBC Bearings' Dodge Industrial, and its own site gives the global headquarters as 1061 Holland Road, Simpsonville, South Carolina.

The works' end, and the ground today: Dodge's own plant geography, on its institutional history, tells where the production went: Rogersville, Tennessee, opened in 1971, then Greenville, South Carolina, in 1977, Asheville, North Carolina, in 1979, Belton, South Carolina, in 1995, Marion, North Carolina, in 1996, and Shanghai in 2000. The manufacturing center of the company moved south and then offshore across those decades; the year Dodge production as such left Mishawaka is not pinned in the record reached, and none is printed. What is documented whole is the foundry's afterlife. The Union Street foundry became RMG Foundry: Foundry Management & Technology, reporting on 2 July 2006, records that "RMG was founded in 1878 as the former Dodge Manufacturing Co.," that the plant had been closed about seven years earlier — about 1999 — and reopened by new owners, the Troyer Group of the marker records, and that in July 2006 it was closing again, employing an estimated 180 workers making cast-iron products for power-transmission equipment, its United Steelworkers local holding the ninety-day shutdown warning, after the loss of a significant portion of its business from its largest customer. The 1999 state marker still stands at 500 South Union Street, at the entrance to the old foundry ground — erected that year by the Historical Bureau and by Dodge itself, the company co-sponsoring its own Mishawaka marker while the foundry still worked under its successor's name. The ground's present state is a matter of current public record: by a City of Mishawaka public notice published 29 May 2026, the Indiana Brownfields Program, with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, approved the city's application for a $500,000 subgrant — federal Brownfields Revolving Loan Fund money through the Indiana Finance Authority — for remediation of hazardous-substances contamination, asbestos, at the former Dodge Manufacturing Company and former RMG Foundry facility, 500 South Union Street (IDEM Site #4060054). Public comment on the cleanup plan ran from 29 May to 30 June 2026; the State Historic Preservation Office had found on 2 December 2025 that no National Register-listed or eligible resources stood within the remediation area, the EPA concurring on 4 December 2025. The works that powered American factories is, in November 2026, a remediation site with a state marker at its gate — and the company Wallace Dodge founded is a $2.9-billion division of a Connecticut bearing maker, headquartered in South Carolina. Both halves of that sentence are the record.

Sources:

1. Indiana Historical Bureau, marker 71.1999.1, "Dodge Manufacturing Company" (erected 1999 by the Bureau and Dodge, at 500 S. Union Street) — Wallace Dodge founded the company here in 1878; Magic Wagon Jacks and wood pulleys; the move to this site in 1880; the Independence Wood Split Pulley patented 1882; the marker's siting "at parking lot & entrance to RMG foundry of the Troyer Group."
2. Discover Indiana (Indiana Historical Society / IUPUI University Library), "Dodge Manufacturing Company" — Wallace Harlow Dodge, Mishawaka-born, and the 1878 Magic Jack patent; the 1881 lightning fire; the pulley patent dated 4 July 1882; the largest rope engine to date, built for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition; forty buildings on sixty-five acres by 1902; the last Dodge building finished in Mishawaka in 1965; Reliance Electric's 1967 acquisition.
3. Dodge Industrial (RBC Bearings), the company's institutional history page, read November 2026 — the 1878 founding to produce Magic Wagon Jacks; the 1882 Independence Split Wood Pulley and interchangeable bushing; cast-iron pulleys 1905; Type C bearing 1923; the 1933 association foundings; Taper-Lock 1939; Type E 1943; the Dodge School of Transmissioneering 1944; Torque-Arm 1949; the plant openings at Rogersville (1971), Greenville (1977), Asheville (1979), Belton (1995), Marion (1996), and Shanghai (2000); and the Simpsonville, South Carolina headquarters the company gives today.
4. Timothy E. Howard, History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), the Dodge company history as carried in the Chicago Research Library digital collection — the 1881 fire, uninsured, and the immediate rebuilding; the product line of iron and wood pulleys, flywheels, split friction clutches, and Eureka water softeners; the Dodge American (Continuous Wind) System of rope transmission; and the Mix biography: shipping clerk 1886, Chicago branch manager 1890, president on Wallace Dodge's death in September 1894, the business more than doubled in a decade.
5. Coachbuilt, the Melvin W. Mix biography — Mix's dates (16 November 1865 – 11 December 1927); the Dodge plant by 1910 at sixty acres, twenty-five acres of floor space, and more than 1,200 employees, Mishawaka's largest employer; and the Mix holdings carried in the entry below.
6. Plant Engineering (December 2017), the Dodge timeline — Reliance Electric's acquisition of Dodge Manufacturing in 1967; and Rockwell International's Form 8-K filed with the SEC (14 June 1995) — the Reliance acquisition completed 27 January 1995 at an approximately $1.6 billion purchase price.
7. Rockwell Automation and Baldor Electric announcements (7 November 2006) — the Power Systems sale at $1.8 billion ($1.75 billion cash and about 1.6 million shares), the segment's roughly $1.0 billion revenue for the twelve months to 30 September 2006, closing in the first quarter of 2007; ABB's 2011 acquisition of Baldor at $4.2 billion (trade press); ABB's release of 26 July 2021 — the Dodge division's sale to RBC Bearings at $2.9 billion cash, about 1,500 employees and about $600 million revenue; Power Technology — the sale concluded 2 November 2021.
8. Foundry Management & Technology (2 July 2006) — RMG Foundry as the former Dodge works, founded 1878, closed about seven years before and reopened by new owners, closing again in July 2006 with an estimated 180 workers, the Steelworkers' ninety-day warning, and the lost largest customer.
9. City of Mishawaka, public notice (published 29 May 2026) — the approved $500,000 Brownfields subgrant for asbestos remediation at the former Dodge Manufacturing / former RMG Foundry facility, 500 South Union Street, IDEM Site #4060054; the comment period of 29 May – 30 June 2026; the SHPO finding of 2 December 2025 and EPA concurrence of 4 December 2025.