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 Leighton Pine had founded in 1868, grown along the East Race, and rebuilt in 1901–02 as a sixty-acre works on Division Street, later Western Avenue, that was supposed to be the largest sewing-machine cabinet factory in the world. The reason the company gave was consolidation: the cabinet work would be merged into plants nearer the lumber supply — the same arithmetic of distance that the History Museum's account shows working on the plant since 1914, as the nearby hardwood forests that had drawn Singer to the St. Joseph River were cut out and the timber came from farther and farther away. The ninety-day shutdown process began in January 1955.

The scale of what was ending is in the plant's own employment series: In 1914, its peak year, the Division Street works employed about 3,000 people, and by an attributed estimate of the period made three-quarters of the world's sewing-machine cabinets. The Depression cut it to 650 employees in 1932, most of them on sixteen-hour weeks. War brought it back to 1,200, but the works was a woodworking plant in a war that wanted metal, and by July 1945 only 500 employees remained, with management expecting a rise to about 1,300 on reconversion that never fully came. No closing-day workforce figure is carried in the record this build could reach, and none is printed: what closed in 1955 was a plant of some hundreds of jobs, not thousands. What it had been was one of the three names — Singer, Oliver, Studebaker — on which the factory city stood. A fire followed at the complex in 1960, and urban-renewal money cleared most of the Western Avenue works; one building, the Marycrest, survives. The Story of South Bend section's sentence for the event stands as this section's: Singer was the first of the great names to go, nine years before the greatest.

Sources:

1. The History Museum, South Bend, "Singer Sewing Machine Company" — the 1868 founding, the employment series (168 in the first year; 898 by 1891; about 3,000 in the peak year 1914; 650 in 1932; 1,200 by the start of the Second World War; 500 in July 1945 with about 1,300 expected), the announcement of the closing in April 1954 and the reason given, the ninety-day shutdown begun in January 1955, and the Marycrest Building as the surviving structure.
2. This build's Spine and Businesses sections — the plant's place among the city's great works, the 1960 fire and the urban-renewal clearance of the Western Avenue complex, and the attributed estimate of three-quarters of the world's cabinets.