What South Bend Sold to the World: A History of Its Exports

Exports · What South Bend sold to the world

South Bend was never a port, and it sold to the whole world anyway. The city's outward trade did not begin with a harbor ledger — no canal station list like Fort Wayne's survives for it, and the St. Joseph River carried more power than cargo — it began with the products themselves. A wagon works at the bend of the river became, by the 1880s, the largest vehicle factory on earth, and its wagons turned up in Mexico, South America, Palestine and Australia; its plows made their maker "Plowmaker to the World" in his own company's phrase, and in 1930 the Soviet Union's buying agency signed for five thousand tractors and a great order of South Bend plows besides. The sewing-machine cabinets of the west side were shipped unfinished to Scotland and finished to South America and Asia. In two world wars the world came here with cables and contracts: British orders for wagons, harness and saddles in 1914, and a generation later a truck built in South Bend by the hundreds of thousands for one customer above all — the Red Army, which took some 152,000 of them through Iran and nicknamed them "Studer." The machinery of the trade followed the goods: a foreign-trade zone in 1986, supervised not by any local customs house but from Chicago; an airport made "International" in 2014; a lake port fifty miles of rail away. And the counting goes on in the federal metropolitan series, which credits the South Bend–Mishawaka metro — the measure is the metro, Mishawaka's works included, and the file says so where the number is printed — with just under a billion dollars of goods exports in 2024. This is the record of that outward trade, firm by firm and road by road, with every figure carrying its date and its keeper.