The second industrial age: the auto-parts conversion

1909–1963

The system changed its product without changing its skills: The census of 1909 already lists the seed of the next age among the engines of the last one — "the establishment and growth of the automobile industry" stands in the Thirteenth Census's own explanation of South Bend's 83.5 per cent growth. What the conversion looked like on the ground can be read on one East Bank site. Singer's vacated East Madison complex, after the cabinet works' 1901 move, took the South Bend Lathe Works as a tenant from 1908 to 1965, and housed the South Bend Motor Car Works, builders of fire vehicles — until 1919, when the site was sold to Bendix. A wagon-and-cabinet district had become, in one generation, a machine-tool and brake-manufacturing district, without a change of workforce so much as a change of catalogue: the same foundrymen, machinists, woodworkers and finishers, retrained by their employers onto carburetors, brakes, lathes and bearings.

The wagon giant made the same passage in place — the Studebaker section records the 1920s works at 225 acres and seven and a half million square feet, with Building 84 raised in 1923 and the Plant 2 foundry, 575,000 square feet, casting 600 tons a day — a wagon plant's direct descendant operating at automobile scale. The firms of the second age — Bendix and the brake and bearing trades, the wartime expansions, Studebaker's December 1963 closing and what it did to the city — are profiled in the Businesses and Studebaker sections, and the closing itself is the Story of South Bend section's turning point. What this section enters is the systemic fact: South Bend's industrial revolution had a second act because its first act had been about transferable capacities — casting, machining, finishing, assembling — rather than about any single product.

When the product changed from wagons to automobiles to brakes and aircraft parts, the system bent and held for another half-century. When it finally broke, it broke at the level of the firm, not the skill: the works that closed in 1963 left behind a city of people who still knew how to make things, and pools of factory ground whose next uses close this section.

Sources:

1. Thirteenth Census of the United States, Vol. IX, Manufactures 1909, Indiana chapter, p. 311 — the establishment and growth of the automobile industry among the causes of South Bend's growth.
2. National Register of Historic Places, East Bank Multiple Property Documentation Form (1997/1999) — the South Bend Lathe Works on the East Madison site, 1908–1965; the South Bend Motor Car Works there until its sale to Bendix in 1919.
3. This build's Studebaker and Businesses sections — the 1920s works (225 acres, 7.5 million square feet, Building 84 of 1923, the Plant 2 foundry at 575,000 square feet and 600 tons of castings a day) and the Bendix record; cross-referenced, not retold.