The factory city

1868 — 1914

In one generation the mill town became a factory city of the first rank: The year 1868, which gave South Bend its two great incorporations, also brought its third: Leighton Pine arrived from the Singer Manufacturing Company's New York office to build a cabinet works on the East Race, making the wooden cabinets in which Singer sewing machines were sold. The Singer works employed 168 men its first year and 898 by 1891; in 1901–02 the company built a vast new plant of some sixty acres on Division Street — now Western Avenue — which the city's own historians describe as supposed to be the largest sewing-machine cabinet factory in the world when it went up, and the plant was turning out, by the peak accounts, 10,000 cabinet sets a day by 1907 and some two million cabinets in its peak year of 1914. Around the three anchors the lesser factories crowded: the South Bend Watch Company after 1903, the South Bend Lathe Works of the O'Brien twins after 1906, iron, wool, paper, toy and agricultural works by the score — the business census of the factory city belongs to the Business section, and the Story of South Bend section keeps only the scale.

The scale, in people: 13,280 in 1880; 21,819 in 1890; 35,999 in 1900; 53,684 in 1910; 70,983 in 1920. Studebaker, by the century's turn commonly described as the largest maker of horse-drawn vehicles in the world, built the wagons and carriages of three continents and employed them by the thousand; the Oliver works, on the 32 riverside acres James Oliver had bought in 1874, had spread to some 58 acres by his death in 1908, when his son Joseph D. Oliver succeeded him — the son's 38-room mansion, Copshaholm, stands today as the centerpiece of The History Museum. In January 1885 the Oliver plant had already shown the factory city's other face, when its mostly Polish workers struck against wage and hour cuts — among the early strikes in the city's long labor history. And across the river, in Mishawaka, the woolen mills that became Ball Band were drawing wages for thousands of households on both banks: Mishawaka's works and Mishawaka's record, named here only because South Bend families ate from them.

Sources:

1. The History Museum, South Bend — the Singer works' history: Pine's 1868 arrival, 168 men the first year and 898 employees by 1891, the 1901–02 Western Avenue plant and its "largest in the world" billing, the 10,000 cabinet sets a day by 1907 and the two-million-cabinet peak of 1914.
2. U.S. Census Bureau, decennial censuses — South Bend, 1880–1920.
3. Oliver Corporation histories — the 1874 purchase of the 32-acre riverfront site, the growth to some 58 acres by James Oliver's death in 1908 and Joseph D. Oliver's succession; Oliver histories — the January 1885 strike of the plant's largely Polish workforce.
4. The History Museum — Copshaholm, built 1895, 38 rooms, the Oliver family home and now the museum's centerpiece.
5. business section, this record — the full industrial census of the factory city.