The Oliver works in 1880: the plant as a place

1880

One works, described whole, stands for the system at its water-and-steam maturity: Chapman's 1880 history walks the Oliver Chilled Plow Works building by building, and it is the fullest single description of a South Bend factory as a working place that the nineteenth-century record gives. The foundry stood 500 feet long by 160 wide, with an addition building that took the width to 220 feet; inside it, three cupolas melted fifty tons of iron a day, with a fourth cupola of twenty tons being added, and 150 molders and 50 helpers worked the floor. The grinding room ran 300 by 60 feet, with 100 men at 89 grindstones. The machine and forge shops, 200 by 60, held 75 men; the dry grinding room 25; the polishing room 25; the wood shop 50; the paint room, 300 by 60 in three fire-walled sections, 25.

The warehouse and shipping depot stretched 1,200 feet with the side tracks of two railroads — the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern on one side and the Northwestern/Grand Trunk line on the other — and held 50,000 plows and half a million plow points in store, tended by 20 men. Four beam sheds, each 480 by 30 feet, each held 125,000 plow beams. Over it all, one power: an engine room housing a Corliss engine Chapman calls the finest in the West, of 700 horsepower, driving 1,794 feet of line shafting — one continuous section of it 467 feet, probably the longest in the West — with 60 counter shafts and 671 bearings to be oiled daily. The payroll carried 520 operatives; 600 men in all worked the ground. Read as a system rather than a firm, the description teaches the era's factory arithmetic: iron arrived by rail and left by rail, the buildings sorted themselves by hazard and dust — fire walls around paint, grinding in its own rooms — and one engine's rotation, distributed by a third of a mile of shafting and counted in bearings oiled, was the works' single heartbeat. The firm that owned it — James Oliver's chilled plow, the 1857 patent, the growth to 62,779 plows sold in 1878 — is profiled in the Businesses section. What is entered here is the plant: the largest machine in the city in 1880 was not any plow or wagon. It was the works itself.

Sources:

1. Chapman, History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880) — the Oliver works described building by building: foundry dimensions and cupolas, the grinding, machine, forge, polishing, wood and paint rooms and their crews, the 1,200-foot warehouse between two railroads' side tracks, the beam sheds, the 700-horsepower Corliss engine, 1,794 feet of line shafting, 60 counter shafts, 671 bearings, 520 operatives and 600 men.
2. This build's Businesses section — the Oliver firm's own record (the 1857 patent, 62,779 plows sold in 1878, the 1876 plant), cross-referenced and not retold.