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Major Events · The Days the City Changed
Most of a city's history is accumulation; a small part of it is rupture. This section keeps the ruptures: the nights and weeks after which South Bend was measurably a different place — a train in a ravine, a wagon works in flames, a factory occupied by its own workers, a front page that ended the automobile century, a curfew, a blizzard, a river higher than any gauge in the city had ever read. Each event is told at the size its record supports, from the official record and the press of record: casualties and damage as those sources state them, figures attributed, estimates labelled estimates, and conflicts between sources printed rather than smoothed. Where another part of this history owns the fuller record — the closing as the firm's story in Studebaker, the wrecks as railroad paper in Trains, the summer of 1967 as a movement record in Black History — this section tells the event and points there.
The Springbrook wreck · the night the railroad killed its passengers
27 JUNE 1859
The young city's first catastrophe came on its proudest work: Eight years after the first train reached South Bend, the Michigan Southern's Night Express , running from Chicago to Toledo with some 150 passengers, plunged into the…
The wagon works burned, twice · and the city watched it rebuild bigger
JUNE 1872 AND 24 AUGUST 1874
Fire was the factory city's recurring catastrophe, and its defining fire story is a story of rebuilding: In June 1872, twenty years after the Studebaker brothers opened their blacksmith shop, fire gutted the works. The company's…
May 1924 · the Klan comes downtown, and the students come down to meet it
MAY 1924
The event is carried in full in the Story of South Bend section and in Black History; its place here is its standing as a turning point: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s was a power in Indiana, and in South Bend it had already shown…
The Bendix sit-down · nine days, or six, that started an era
17–25 NOVEMBER 1936
On the morning of 17 November 1936, the sit-down strike came to the automobile industry in South Bend: Workers in several departments of the Bendix Products plant stopped work and stayed at their machines. About a thousand…
The first of the great names to go · Singer, 1954
APRIL 1954 – JANUARY 1955
Nine years before the greatest closing, the first one taught the city what a closing announcement sounded like: In April 1954 the Singer Manufacturing Company announced that it would close its South Bend cabinet works — the plant…
Nine days in December · the announcement that ended the automobile century
9–20 DECEMBER 1963
The firm's record of the closing is Studebaker's to tell; what follows is the city's event: On Monday, 9 December 1963, Studebaker's board voted to close the South Bend plant and consolidate automobile production at Hamilton…
The pension collapse · what December 1963 did to the households
1964 – 1974
The closing's second blow landed more slowly, and it landed on named streets: Studebaker's hourly workers' pension plan had been built up from 1950 on generous terms — benefits increased through successive negotiations while the…
Palm Sunday · the evening the tornadoes crossed the county
11 APRIL 1965
The city of South Bend was not struck on Palm Sunday 1965; its county was a corridor: The outbreak of 11 April 1965 was Indiana's deadliest tornado day — 137 people killed in the state, among more than 260 killed across six…
The night of 26 July 1967 · the curfew
26 JULY 1967
The full record of this night — its grievances, its documents, its long aftermath — is Black History's; here is the night as the city lived it: The LaSalle Park neighborhood, "the Lake," entered that summer with a drained lake…
The Blizzard of January 1978 · the city shovelled itself out
25–27 JANUARY 1978
The storm closed the city for days and stands in the official record as the peak of the hardest winter ever measured here: The winter of 1977–78 was, in the National Weather Service's settled figures, the coldest and snowiest on…
The river's record before the record · 1982 and 1993
15 MARCH 1982 AND 6 JANUARY 1993
The St. Joseph River's documented crest history at South Bend, as the gauges carry it, is shorter than the city's memory of floods — and the gap is printed plainly: Until February 2018, the highest crest ever recorded at South…
The second unwinding · 1985, 1989, 2011
1985 – 2012
Studebaker's closing was the catastrophe; the decades after it were an unwinding, plant by plant: In 1985 White Motor closed the original Oliver works — Factory No. 1 on the river, the plant of the chilled plow that had made…
The collapse of 2008–09 · South Bend's face of the Great Recession
2008 – 2010
The national collapse reached South Bend as a doubling: By the Bureau of Labor Statistics' local area series, the number of unemployed people in the South Bend–Mishawaka metro area stood at 8,072 in 2007. It rose to 10,470 in…
The rain flood · August 2016
15–16 AUGUST 2016
The first of the two great floods was not the river's work: On the night of 15–16 August 2016, rain fell on South Bend and St. Joseph County at one to two inches an hour for hours. The National Weather Service's event summary…
The river's record · February 2018
19–22 FEBRUARY 2018
Eighteen months after the rain flood, the river itself came up higher than it had ever been measured: February 2018 began as the snowiest February on record at the South Bend cooperative observer — snow fell on ten of the month's…
14 April 2019 · a mayor announces for president on a Studebaker floor
14 APRIL 2019
This closing entry is short, and its claim is narrow: On 14 April 2019, Mayor Pete Buttigieg announced his candidacy for president of the United States from the floor of Studebaker Building 84, in the old works, in the district…