Indiana manufacturing firsts.

• Author: Beck, Bill

From steel to automotive electronics to caskets, Indiana is a leader in manufacturing.

Because of its central location, its outstanding transportation network and its access to raw materials, Indiana has long had a leading role in U.S. manufacturing.

According to the Indiana Department of Commerce, Indiana ranks number one nationally in such manufacturing segments as steel, motor homes, television sets and engine-electrical equipment. The Hoosier state also is a leader in the production of refrigerators, elevators, pumps and truck trailers.

Blessed with a network of interstate highways, strong railway transportation and publicly owned ports on the Ohio River and Lake Michigan, the state is a natural location for manufacturers, and has been a major manufacturing force for much of the 20th century.

Original-equipment manufacture for the automobile industry is a case in point. The state Department of Commerce points out that Indiana is located within 625 miles of 84 percent of North American car production. The Big Three domestic automobile manufacturers continue to be based in Detroit, and foreign automobile manufacturers in the 1980s began locating assembly plants along the interstate highway system in the Midwest and Mid-South.

American Honda builds cars in Marysville, Ohio, and Toyota has a major assembly plant in Kentucky. Subaru-Isuzu has an assembly plant off Interstate 65 near Lafayette, and in the past two years, German automobile manufacturers BMW and Mercedes-Benz have made plans for major new facilities in the South.

It's not illogical that Indiana has retained its close identification with automotive manufacturing. Elwood Haynes pioneered the modern American automobile industry in the Kokomo and Tipton area at the turn of the century, and as late as the 1920s, the massive Nordyke-Marmon plant in Indianapolis employed some 5,000 Hoosiers. That automotive tradition continues today, as Indiana remains one of the nation's strongholds for automotive OEM.

But Indiana also is noted for production of everything from raw steel products to caskets. The state reported more than $13 billion in manufacturing investment during the 1980s and early 1990s. As American manufacturing restructures to meet global competition, the Hoosier state is likely to maintain its place as a center for manufacturing technology.

STEEL AND THE REGION

During the past 15 years, the steelmaking complex on the south shore of Lake Michigan in Northwest Indiana has cemented its place as the nation's leading manufacturing center for raw steel products.

It was the first decade of the century when Judge Elbert H. Gary convinced J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie--his colleagues in the giant U.S. Steel combine--to locate a mill and planned city on the sand dunes east of Chicago. Ever since, Gary and "The Region" of Lake and Porter counties have been a force to be reckoned with in the domestic steel industry.

The Region makes economic sense for locating steel mills. Northwest Indiana is at the confluence of a raw-material transportation network that has existed for a century. Steel is a witch's brew of iron, coking coal and limestone, and Northwest Indiana is an ideal location for integrated steel mills because of the proximity of the major steel ingredients.

The 1980s were dismal years for America's domestic steel industry. But while mills were all but disappearing from the other traditional steelmaking regions--Pennsylvania, Ohio and Illinois--Northwest Indiana wound up as the last bastion of integrated steelmaking in the United States. Close to 25 percent of the steel produced in the United States is made in Lake and Porter counties. No region in the country even comes...