Fire, flood, and the toll of the works

1844–1881 AND AFTER

The system's other product was loss, and the record keeps it in fires: Begin where this section began: the third user of the Manufacturing Company's power, Finley & Brown's tub-and-bucket factory, burned down just after getting into operation and was never rebuilt. The wagon works burned twice in three years — $80,000 in 1872, $350,000 in 1874 with 2,400 finished wagons in the loss — and came back each time in brick and bigger, which is why its story is told as growth; but the arithmetic underneath is the era's ordinary one, in which a wooden factory city, lit and heated by flame, floored with timber and stocked with seasoned lumber, paint and varnish, periodically combusted. The water that powered the works was also a hazard with its own record.

The National Register's East Bank documentation carries the great ice gorge of 1881, when the river's ice destroyed bridges at the bend; and the Oliver firm's Mishawaka prelude — boundary-printed here, as those works stood in Mishawaka and belong to that city's record — turns on both elements at once: the foundry's water power washed away in a flood, and the works totally destroyed by fire on 24 December 1859, as Howard's history tells it, before the move to South Bend put the firm on this city's safer and larger ground. What the record does not give, in the sources reached for this section, is a plant-level toll of the industrial accident — no factory-inspection series naming South Bend's dead and maimed by works and year was found, and the gap is named rather than filled: the accident history of the city's cupolas, grindstones and line shafts exists in the state's inspection reports and the Tribune's columns, and a later pass of this build should mine them. What stands documented here is the hazard in its civic form. A city that built in wood, burned, rebuilt in brick, dammed a river that jammed with ice and tore its bridges, and ground its plowshares on 89 grindstones in one room, paid for its manufactures in property and, in measure the present sources do not total, in people.

Sources:

1. Chapman, History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880) — the Finley & Brown factory's burning at its start.
2. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, Vol. 1 (1907), ch. V — the Studebaker fires of 1872 and 1874 with their losses; and, for the boundary-printed Mishawaka works, the washed-away water power and the fire of 24 December 1859.
3. National Register of Historic Places, East Bank Multiple Property Documentation Form (1997/1999) — the ice gorge of 1881 and its destroyed bridges.