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The Second Tier: Fortunes the Record Does Not Size
South Bend Lathe: The O'Brien twins — John J. and Miles W. O'Brien, born in Cork in 1868 — founded the South Bend Lathe Works in one room in 1906 and built it into, by the company's own history, the largest exclusive maker of precision lathes in the world, building 47% of the engine lathes sold in the United States by 1930, its machines in eighty-eight countries. No published estate or fortune figure for either brother appears in the sources consulted — not in the company's history, which records their deaths (Miles earlier, John the year after the Second World War ended) without sizing what they left — and none is stated here. The fortune is documented as a company, not as an estate.
Wilson Brothers: The Wilson brothers' shirt fortune was never South Bend's to size. The firm was founded by four brothers — John, E. Crane, Hugh, and Milton Wilson — in Cincinnati in 1864 and headquartered in Chicago from 1868; South Bend was its manufacturing seat, not its home: production here from 1883, factory land bought from J. D. Oliver in 1887, 12½ acres of floor space and 2,200 employees at the 1929 peak, turning out 72,000 shirts in an 8½-hour day (Discover Indiana). No estate figure for any Wilson principal appears in the sources consulted.
Singer: The Singer money, likewise, was made elsewhere and only spent here as wages. Isaac Merritt Singer died in 1875 dividing a fortune of $13,000,000 among his children — a New York fortune, retired to England. South Bend's part was Leighton Pine, a Singer cabinet worker hired in New York in 1860 who established the cabinet factory here in 1868 on a site purchased for $2,500; the works grew to some 3,000 employees at their 1914 peak making an estimated 2,000,000 cabinets a year, and closed in March 1955 (Discover Indiana). No fortune record for Pine appears in the sources consulted. These three stand in this section on their documented scale — companies of the first rank, personal fortunes the published record does not size — and the gap is stated rather than filled.
Sources:
- South Bend Lathe Company, company history — the 1906 founding by the O'Brien twins; 47% of U.S. engine lathes by 1930; the brothers' deaths without estate figures.
- Discover Indiana (Indiana Historical Society / IUPUI) — Wilson Brothers Shirt Factory: the four brothers, Cincinnati 1864, Chicago 1868, South Bend from 1883, the 1887 land purchase, 2,200 employees and 72,000 shirts a day by 1929; Singer Sewing Machine Factory: Leighton Pine, the $2,500 site, the 1914 peak, the 1955 closing.
- Biographical record of Isaac Merritt Singer — the $13,000,000 fortune divided at his death in 1875.