South Bend's Industrial Revolution: Water, Steam and the Factory City

The Industrial Revolution · Water, Steam, and the Factory City

South Bend's industry did not begin with a factory. It began with a fall of water. Where the St. Joseph River makes its great southern bend, the river drops, and for a trading-post town of a few hundred people that drop was the one form of wealth the place held in common: power that did not eat, did not tire, and could be rented out by the cubic foot. Between 1835 and 1845 two rival companies fought over that fall in court and in the riverbed, and the system they finally built — a dam across the St. Joseph and a race on each bank — decided where the city's factories would stand for the next hundred years. Everything in this section follows that decision: the sawmills and gristmills that took the first power, the woolen and paper mills that lined the races, the moment steam engines were set down beside the waterwheels and then in place of them, the three great works — Oliver's plows, Studebaker's wagons, Singer's cabinets — that turned a county seat into one of Indiana's manufacturing cities, the Polish and Hungarian workers the plants drew across an ocean, the fifty-four-to-sixty-hour week the census found them working, the fires that periodically unmade what the water had made, and the long second act in which the races were filled in, the works demolished, and the same river, in 1984 and again in 2022, was put back to work doing new things. The firms themselves are profiled in the Businesses and Studebaker sections of this record; what is told here is the transformation they added up to.