South Bend Business and Industry History

South Bend, Indiana · topic

South Bend Business and Industry History

Studebaker and the factory city: firms, founders, banks, inventions and fortunes.

Business & Industry

§ 07South Bend Business History: The Firms That Made a Manufacturing CityWhat this section carries is everything else — and everything else is a great deal. A National Register nomination of 1995, quoting the count of its day, puts about 400 manufacturers in South Bend in 1926. They made the…57 entry pages § 09Studebaker in South Bend: The Wagon Shop That Became a Car CompanyStudebaker is the axis of South Bend's history. A two-man blacksmith shop opened at Michigan and Jefferson streets on 16 February 1852, with $68 of capital, became within one generation the largest builder of…23 entry pages § 28South Bend Founders and Chief Executives: The People Who Started and Ran Its CompaniesSouth Bend's business history is usually told as a history of firms — the wagon works, the plow works, the brake plant, the bank. This section tells it as a history of people: the traders who bought the townsite, the…25 entry pages § 08South Bend Banks: From the State Bank Branch of 1838 to 1st SourceSouth Bend has banked under every system American law has offered. Its first bank was a branch of a state-owned bank, opened in 1838 in a two-story brick building at Michigan and Colfax; its second generation was a…19 entry pages § 11South Bend's Industrial Revolution: Water, Steam and the Factory CitySouth Bend's industry did not begin with a factory. It began with a fall of water. Where the St. Joseph River makes its great southern bend, the river drops, and for a trading-post town of a few hundred people that drop…19 entry pages § 12South Bend Inventors and Inventions: The Patent RecordSouth Bend's inventive record is unusually legible, because so much of it was written down in the one record that cannot be puffed: the letters patent themselves, with their numbers, their filing dates, and the…12 entry pages § 14South Bend Technology: From the Basilica Spire to the Fiber RingSouth Bend's technology story runs in three ages, and the thread through all three is that the city made the machinery other places ran on. The first age is electrical: in April 1899 a Notre Dame professor strung 150…13 entry pages § 13South Bend and the Dot-Com Era: South Bend on the WebAsked plainly — did anybody from South Bend win the dot-com era? — the record answers yes, but in a shape almost opposite to Fort Wayne's. Fort Wayne produced people; South Bend produced infrastructure. This city's…14 entry pages § 15Farms and Crops of South Bend and St. Joseph County: The County That Fed the CitySouth Bend was platted on a river bend in a county of prairie, oak opening, and marsh, and for its first century the city's life ran on what that county could grow. The prairies — Terre Coupee and Harris above all …16 entry pages § 16Tractors in South Bend and St. Joseph CountySouth Bend is the plow city that also built tractors — twice over, in two different senses of the word. In the 1920s the Oliver Chilled Plow Works, the largest plow factory in the world, experimented with a tractor of…10 entry pages § 17What South Bend Sold to the World: A History of Its ExportsSouth Bend was never a port, and it sold to the whole world anyway. The city's outward trade did not begin with a harbor ledger — no canal station list like Fort Wayne's survives for it, and the St. Joseph River carried…16 entry pages § 29South Bend's Great Fortunes: Made, Kept, Lost and Given AwaySouth Bend's money has a shape, and it is top-heavy in a way Fort Wayne's is not. The first fortune was not made here at all in any lasting form: the fur trade's biggest local name ended in a documented debt workout…17 entry pages § 95Lottery and Crypto Windfalls in South BendSouth Bend has played the state's game since the first scratch-off tickets were sold on October 13, 1989, and the published record of that play is specific: no South Bend ticket has ever won a Powerball or Mega Millions…13 entry pages § 99South Bend Dealerships: The Lots That Sold the CarsThe Dealerships · The houses that sold South Bend its carsEvery other city in this record bought its cars from men who sold what distant factories built. South Bend built its own. For a hundred and eleven years the wagons, and then the cars, rolled out of the Studebaker works…14 entry pages

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Using this page? Copy a credit line. Last updated November 12, 2026.

Source: South Bend Business and Industry History, Moosed History by Project Moosed, https://history.projectmoosed.com/usa/midwest/indiana/south-bend/topics/business-industry/

@misc{moosed-business-industry,
  title        = {{South Bend Business and Industry History}},
  howpublished = {\url{https://history.projectmoosed.com/usa/midwest/indiana/south-bend/topics/business-industry/}},
  organization = {Project Moosed},
  note         = {Moosed History. Last updated 2026-11-12. Accessed 2026-11-12},
  year         = {2026}
}