The labor the factories drew

1865–1920

The works were built by men the works had summoned: A factory system that grows from 2,500 hands in 1880 to nearly 12,000 wage-earners in 1909 cannot hire its growth from one county's farm boys, and South Bend did not. The Population section of this record carries the census arithmetic: in 1900 the city's foreign-born numbered 8,601, 23.9 per cent of all its people, with 3,053 born in Poland and 2,402 in Germany the largest streams, and 7,106 residents of Polish foreign parentage counted the same year. What belongs to this section is the drawing mechanism, and the Population record states it plainly: the Polish stream began with railroad section hands in the late 1860s — men hired to lay and keep the very lines the factories shipped on — and was then fed by the Oliver and Studebaker works; the Hungarian stream was recruited from the 1880s by the plow works, the wagon works and the railroads, employers reaching back across the Atlantic for foundry and forge labor.

The settlement followed the work with a geography any map of the west side still shows: the Polish and Hungarian districts grew up within walking distance of the Oliver works and the rail crossings, and their institutions kept the works' calendar — St. Stephen's parish founded for the Hungarians in 1900, Our Lady of Hungary in 1916, the Polish parishes and halls of the west side in their own entries in the Communities record. The drawing also had its friction, and it came early: in January 1885 the Oliver works struck, the strikers mostly Polish workers, and the affair ended with bayonets in the streets, as the Businesses section records — the first great labor confrontation of the factory city, twenty-five years before the census counted its second-in-the-state standing. The neighborhoods' full story — parishes, halls, newspapers, the west side's own civic life — belongs to the neighborhoods and Communities passes of this build. The industrial fact stands here: South Bend's factories did not find their workforce. They imported it, recruited it, and housed it in walking distance of the gates, and the city's ethnic map is a factory document before it is anything else.

Sources:

1. This build's Population section — the foreign-born of 1900 (8,601; 23.9 per cent), the Polish-born (3,053) and German-born (2,402), the 7,106 of Polish foreign parentage, the section-hand beginning of the Polish stream, the recruiting of the Hungarian stream by the plow works, wagon works and railroads, and the parishes of 1900 and 1916; cross-referenced, the demographic record stands there.
2. This build's Businesses section — the Oliver strike of January 1885, its mostly Polish strikers and the bayonets, cross-referenced.