Steam laid over water

1870–1914

The races were never replaced in a day; they were outgrown in layers: The mature South Bend works of 1900 was a hybrid, and the record lets us watch the layers settle. At Singer's East Bank plant, water power came first, and by 1870 two boilers and a steam engine had been added to it — steam for the dry kilns and the dry days, water for the line shafts. At the Studebaker works about 1900, the Businesses and Studebaker sections of this record count the plant's prime movers from the company's own showing: twenty boilers, sixteen dynamos, sixteen stationary engines and some 600 machines, with seven miles of belting carrying power from shaft to bench across a works of about 100 acres and 3,000 workers. A plant like that did not care whether its first turn came from a turbine or a Corliss engine; what it bought from the race era was the site, the workforce and the rail siding, and what it bought from coal was freedom from the river's seasons — no low water in August, no ice in January, no landlord company metering the flow.

The Oliver works made the same passage in the opposite direction, and its 1880 portrait in the next entry catches the transition mid-stride: a foundry town within the city, driven by a single great steam engine of 700 horsepower, in a works whose owner would, twenty-three years later, buy the West Race itself and turn its water into electricity. That purchase is the hinge of this whole section. Water power did not end in South Bend when steam arrived; it changed state, from a mechanical drive let by the foot to an electric current generated at the dam and sold by the wire — and the city's first electric utility, told below, grew up on a site between the East Race and the river. The races themselves faded as machinery: by the early twentieth century the National Register's documentation notes that many large industries no longer used water power at all, preferring to generate electricity with coal-fired steam turbines. The canals that had been dug to turn wheels ended as real estate with water in it.

Sources:

1. National Register of Historic Places, East Bank Multiple Property Documentation Form (1997/1999) — Singer's 1870 boilers and steam engine beside the water power; the late-century turn of large industries from water power to coal-fired steam-turbine electricity.
2. This build's Businesses and Studebaker sections — the Studebaker works' plant census about 1900: twenty boilers, sixteen dynamos, sixteen stationary engines, 600 machines, seven miles of belting, about 100 acres, 3,000 workers; cross-referenced, the firm's profile stands in those sections.
3. Chapman, History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880) — the Oliver works' 700-horsepower Corliss engine, detailed in the next entry.