The Cutter works — the streetlight factory

1904 – 1930

A Thomson-Houston man comes to South Bend: George Cutter was born in Boston in 1853 and was working for Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, the year of the telephone's invention — in what role, The History Museum's account of him states plainly, is not certain. Bell sent him to Russia for two years as a representative of the International Bell Telephone Company. In 1883 he joined the Thomson-Houston Company — one of the two firms whose 1892 merger formed General Electric — and in 1885 represented it at the International Inventions Exhibition in London; the museum's account gives him the unofficial title of "founder of GE International." He incorporated his own electrical company in Chicago in 1899 with $5,000; a factory fire in 1902, and a landlord he did not trust to prevent another, set him looking for ground of his own. In 1904 he paid $5,000 for two and a half acres at the corner of Notre Dame Avenue and Northside Boulevard in South Bend and built his factory; legally he started fresh — a new George Cutter Company, incorporated in Indiana on 5 April 1905 with his partner Albert Schneible and a capital investment of $10,000.

The Arcadian lamp and the national trade: Cutter took out patents on streetlight improvements, and from 1907 the works made the product it is still found by: the Arcadian style street lamp, a one-piece cast-iron pole of 250 pounds with a domed fixture, designed to be looked at as much as lit by. In June 1910 Cutter lamps went up over South Bend's own Michigan Street. That year the company raised its capitalization to $25,000 and planned a 31,000-square-foot addition. Before the winter of 1912 Cutter sold the company to Chicago buyers — the museum's account names the Ripley brothers — who raised the capitalization from $25,000 to $500,000, bought the J. Lang Electrical Company of Chicago, and made Cutter a vice president for research and development with a laboratory in Washington, D.C.; he left South Bend on 2 February 1912 and died in Los Angeles on 7 April 1915, attending the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition. Under its new owners the company enlarged the plant in 1912 and won streetlighting contracts in Michigan City, South Haven, Saskatoon and Kalamazoo; in November 1915 it introduced the Sol-Lux fixture, whose diffused, even light the museum credits for how many Cutter lamps survive in use. By the end of 1915 the works employed more than 200, kept branch offices in New York, Chicago and St. Louis, and had lights in South America, Australia and Europe.

Westinghouse, and the end: In 1920 Westinghouse bought the Cutter company and consolidated all of its streetlight manufacturing into the South Bend works. By the end of 1921, the museum's account quotes the contemporary standing, the George Cutter Company was "the largest and best-known manufacturer of street light equipment in the United States," its lights in Chicago, Detroit, Denver, Miami and Beverly Hills. By 1924 it was doing $2 million a year in sales on a capitalization raised to $5 million; it won the contracts to light St. Louis, the national sesquicentennial celebration in Philadelphia, and New Orleans, lit South Bend's city hall and the Sunnymede and Riverside neighborhoods at home, opened a branch factory at Valdosta, Georgia, and reached $5 million in annual sales. In 1925 Westinghouse bought the outstanding stock and made the company a wholly owned subsidiary; at the end of 1926 the Cutter name was dropped in what Westinghouse called a merger and the museum calls an assimilation — the factory became simply a Westinghouse plant. The works was landlocked, with no room to expand, and when the Depression came Westinghouse closed the South Bend factory in 1930 and moved what production remained to Cleveland; 475 South Bend workers lost their jobs. The building stood for more than a century — housing, in time, a construction company, a county job-training program and a home-care office — and was demolished in 2007. Cutter lamps still stand in South Bend's Riverside neighborhood and in historic districts across the country, the maker's name cast into the iron: "George Cutter Co., South Bend, Indiana."

Sources:

1. The History Museum, South Bend — A Bend in Time: Forgotten Businesses of South Bend, Series 02, Episode 07, "George Cutter Company" (transcript) — the whole account: Bell, Russia, Thomson-Houston and London; the 1899 incorporation and the 1902 fire; the 1904 purchase and the Indiana incorporation of 5 April 1905; the Arcadian lamp from 1907; Michigan Street, June 1910; the sale and the $500,000 capitalization; Cutter's death, 7 April 1915; Sol-Lux, November 1915; the 1920 Westinghouse purchase and consolidation; "the largest and best-known manufacturer of street light equipment in the United States" by the end of 1921; the 1924–26 contracts and the $5 million sales year; the 1926 assimilation; the 1930 closure, 475 jobs, the move to Cleveland; the 2007 demolition.