The woodworking cluster

1863–1926

South Bend's specialty was wood that moved: Count the East Bank's nine plants of 1885 again — cabinets, toys, two carriage works, two lumber and log concerns — and add the wagon works' fifty million feet of lumber a year, and the cluster explains itself. Northern Indiana and Michigan timber came down to the bend by water and rail; the races and then the steam plants turned it into the wooden machinery of a wooden age: sewing-machine cabinets by the thousands a day at Singer's, wagons and carriages at Studebaker's, Winkler's and Seafers's, toys at the South Bend Toy Company — a firm the Businesses section notes began in 1874 "on the old Mill Race" — and the Birdsell works' clover hullers, farm machines whose wooden frames carried South Bend's name into every seed-growing county.

Howard's 1907 manufactures chapter reads, in its back sections, like the cluster's directory: the Indiana Lumber and Manufacturing Company; the Colfax Manufacturing Company, making light wagons; the Stephenson Manufacturing Company, in wood turnings; the South Bend Iron Bed Company working the wood-metal border; and, down the same list, the trades that served the shops — the Matthews Steam Boiler Works, Colmer Brothers in tools and bicycle specialties, the South Bend Watch Company near the eastern city limits, the Indiana Foundry Company (organized 17 April 1903 with a capital of $10,000), the South Bend Foundry Company, and the La Salle Paper Company, the East Race's paper mill in its corporate maturity. The cluster's economics were the transformation's economics in miniature: a shared labor pool of woodworkers, machinists and finishers that any new shop could hire from; shared suppliers of lumber, hardware and power; and shared knowledge that passed between works with every foreman who changed employers.

It is why the count of the city's manufacturers could stand, by a National Register nomination's reckoning quoted in the Businesses section, at about 400 in 1926 — long after the races that started the cluster had ceased to matter as power. The firms are profiled in Businesses; the cluster — the fact that they were all here, together, feeding on the same timber and the same workforce — is this section's subject, and it was seeded by the water: the first address of nearly every strand of it is a race bank.

Sources:

1. National Register of Historic Places, East Bank Multiple Property Documentation Form (1997/1999) — the nine East Bank plants of the Sanborn map of 1885.
2. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, Vol. 1 (1907), ch. V, secs. 3–16 — Birdsell, Staley, the Indiana Foundry Company of 1903, the La Salle Paper Company, Winkler Brothers, and the long tail of Matthews Steam Boiler Works, Indiana Lumber and Manufacturing, Colfax Manufacturing, Stephenson Manufacturing, South Bend Iron Bed, Colmer Brothers, the South Bend Watch Company and the South Bend Foundry Company.
3. This build's Businesses section — South Bend Toy's beginning in 1874 on the old Mill Race, and the count of about 400 manufacturers in South Bend in 1926, cross-referenced.