The first manufactures, before the dam

1836–1842

The first factory building in South Bend made nothing: The 1880 county history is blunt about the ordering of the town's industrial life — the first building erected for manufacturing purposes was the "old glass house" of 1836, a frame about sixty by eighty feet with a wing, built near the crossing of Division and General Taylor streets by a company of John Brownfield, John T. McClelland and Johnson Horrell. They had been talked into glass by S. Johnson, a practical glass-blower newly arrived from the East, who found the local sand excellent and proved it in experiment. What the bend could not supply was glass-making clay at a price that left a profit, and the enterprise was abandoned before it produced; the empty building served for public meetings and boys' Sunday ball-playing until the winter of 1837, when its roof fell in under snow. The lots were afterward built over with residences. It is the right first entry for this section because it states the rule the races would repeal: before 1844, a manufacturer at the bend had to bring his power with him — muscle, horse, or a steam engine and its fuel — and the town's raw materials and markets were a wagon-haul away. Glass failed on materials, not on skill. The gristmills and sawmills that worked the river's banks in these years were small water affairs on natural fall and mill seats, the artisan generation the dam was about to displace: within a decade of the glass house's collapse, power at the bend would be a utility, sold by companies that owned no mills at all.

Sources:

1. Chapman, History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), "South Bend as a Manufacturing Point," pp. 870–871 — the old glass house of 1836, its company, its sand and its clay, and its end under the snow of 1837.