The west race and the riverfront works

1844–1903

The west bank took the heavier trades: If the east race collected the wood shops, the west side collected iron. A South Bend magazine of May 1919, looking back, put the early industrial center "at what is now the foot of Washington avenue, west of the river" — the ground below the dam on the west bank where the West Race ran. It was there that the city's defining works assembled. The Oliver Chilled Plow Works, whose founder's Mishawaka years are boundary-printed in the Businesses section and belong to that city's record, built its great South Bend plant on the west side in 1876 — thirty-two acres, five buildings, 200,000 square feet, 400 men, 300 plows a day, as the Businesses section records from the University of Notre Dame's Building South Bend.

The Studebaker wagon works grew on the south side of the rail line that crossed the city west to east, rebuilt in brick after its fires of 1872 and 1874 on the site it would occupy for ninety years. The Birdsell clover-huller works rose at Division and Columbia streets in 1872 at a cost of $118,000, its main building 165 by 65 feet and five floors, Chapman notes. The geography had a logic a map still shows: the races fixed the first addresses, but the mature district was a braid of water and rail, each works taking power from the race or coal from the siding, whichever its machinery wanted, and the heaviest works — foundries that melted iron by the tens of tons — gathered where both could be had together.

The braid's west-side knot held for a century: in 1903 the Oliver company bought the West Race water-power rights outright, and within two years had built a hydro-electric plant on it, a transaction told in the electrification entry below. The power company era on the west race ended not when the water failed, but when the tenant became the owner.

Sources:

1. South Bend Today, May 1919 — the industrial center at the foot of Washington Avenue, west of the river, from the 1844 dam forward; printed as a period account.
2. This build's Businesses section — the Oliver works of 1876 (thirty-two acres, five buildings, 200,000 square feet, 400 men, 300 plows a day) and the 1903 purchase of the West Race rights, cross-referenced.
3. Chapman, History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880) — the Birdsell works of 1872 at Division and Columbia streets, $118,000, main building 165 by 65 feet, five floors.
4. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, Vol. 1 (1907), ch. V — the Studebaker fires of 1872 and 1874 and the brick rebuilding on the present site.