The machinery: a zone, an airport, and somebody else's port

1961 — present

An inland city's paperwork: South Bend's exports have always moved on other cities' water. The federal record documents the machinery the city built for the trade anyway. Foreign-Trade Zone 125 was approved by the Foreign-Trade Zones Board on 11 March 1986 (Board Order 326), with the St. Joseph County Airport Authority as grantee; its general-purpose sites were seven acres at 2809 North Foundation Drive in the Airport Industrial Park and twenty-one acres at 1507 South Olive Street, and its first subzone of record, 125A, covered EWI, Inc., a maker of steel body parts for automobiles, in South Bend. The Board's notices state the zone's customs geography without embarrassment: FTZ 125 sits "within and adjacent to the Chicago Customs and Border Protection port of entry" — an inland zone supervised from Chicago, a hundred miles west, because that is where the port is.

In 2010 the Board reorganized the zone under the Alternative Site Framework (Order 1720, 29 October 2010), making both sites magnet sites and extending the service area to six counties: St. Joseph, Elkhart, Kosciusko, Marshall, LaPorte and Starke. The record also carries the honest wrinkle the Ports of Indiana's 2010 survey noted: the zone received no foreign merchandise in fiscal 2008 — the instrument existed before the traffic did. The lake port the traffic uses is the Port of Indiana–Burns Harbor, on Lake Michigan in Porter County northwest of the city, one of the three ports of the state authority established in 1961: its grain terminal, on the Ports of Indiana's figures, exported more than 500 million bushels of corn and soybeans between its opening in 1979 and its closing in 2023, and in June 2025 the authority chose Louis Dreyfus Company to reopen it, with operations expected from early 2026; in 2024 U.S. Customs and Border Protection approved Burns Harbor's proposal for the first international sea cargo container terminal on Lake Michigan.

The third instrument is in the air: in April 2014 South Bend Regional Airport became South Bend International Airport, reported at the time as only the second Indiana airport, after Indianapolis, with federal permission to handle international flights both private and commercial, and a federal inspection station for Customs and Border Protection followed — a 26,000-square-foot passenger processing facility built to handle 200 international passengers an hour. The airport's director spoke then of processing international cargo for area business in the future; the file records that as the stated ambition of 2015, not as an outcome. What never changed is the shape beneath the instruments: the goods leave by rail and truck — to Chicago's gateways, to Burns Harbor's docks — and the city's own contribution to the journey is the zone, the inspection station, and the firms.

Sources:

1. Foreign-Trade Zones Board, Federal Register notices — FTZ 125 approved 11 March 1986 (Board Order 326, 51 FR 10564); the two general-purpose sites; the ASF reorganization approved 29 October 2010 (Order No. 1720) with the six-county service area; the zone "within and adjacent to the Chicago Customs and Border Protection port of entry."
2. Ports of Indiana, U.S. Foreign-Trade Zone survey deck (September 2010) — Subzone 125A, EWI, Inc., steel body parts for automobiles, South Bend; FTZ 125's receipt of no foreign merchandise in FY 2008.
3. Ports of Indiana announcements (June 2025) and the trade press — the Burns Harbor grain terminal's export of more than 500 million bushels of corn and soybeans, 1979–2023; Louis Dreyfus Company selected to reopen it, operations expected early 2026; CBP approval (2024) of the first international sea cargo container terminal on Lake Michigan.
4. WNDU reporting of 23 April 2014 and the South Bend Tribune's account of March 2015 — the renaming to South Bend International Airport, the federal permission for international private and commercial flights, and the 26,000-square-foot federal inspection station for 200 passengers an hour, with the airport director's stated cargo ambition.