The rail-served plant

1870–1905

The second network decided which works would grow: The races explain the first factory addresses; the railroads explain the second. The Michigan Central's branch reached the East Bank in 1870 and terminated at the Singer facility on East Madison, with its yards across Niles Street — a railroad ending, literally, at a cabinet works' door. The Oliver warehouse of 1880, in Chapman's walking description, stood with the side tracks of two competing trunk lines along its two faces, the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern on one side and the Northwestern/Grand Trunk on the other, so that plows could be loaded for either system from the same 1,200-foot floor. And in the new century the logic completed itself when a manufacturer built its own railroad: the New Jersey, Indiana & Illinois Railroad — Singer's own line, incorporated in 1902 and in service by 1905, running eleven miles from the Singer works to the Wabash Railroad at Pine, Indiana — exists in this record because the cabinet works' second plant, built away from the races after 1901, needed a trunk-line connection no existing road gave it, as the Businesses section details.

The rail-served plant differed from the race-served mill in kind, not just in address. It was sited by siding rather than by fall; it could stand anywhere the land was cheap and level, which in practice meant the city's edges and the big west and south tracts where Studebaker's Plant 2 and the twentieth-century works would rise; and its power came from its own boiler house, not from a landlord's canal. Every later geography in this section — the auto-age plants, the wartime expansions, the industrial parks on old factory ground — descends from that emancipation. The races made South Bend a factory town. The sidings made it a factory city that could grow past its river.

Sources:

1. National Register of Historic Places, East Bank Multiple Property Documentation Form (1997/1999) — the Michigan Central branch of 1870 terminating at the Singer facility on East Madison, yards across Niles Street.
2. Chapman, History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880) — the Oliver warehouse between the side tracks of the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern and the Northwestern/Grand Trunk.
3. This build's Businesses section — the New Jersey, Indiana & Illinois Railroad, Singer's own line, incorporated 1902 and in service 1905, eleven miles to the Wabash at Pine; cross-referenced.