This drawing shows the Columbian Enameling and Stamping plant in Terre Haute in its early-20th-century heyday. Courtesy Vigo County Public Library Special Collections
Press operators at Columbian Enameling and Stamping in Terre Haute make kitchenware products in the early 20th century. Courtesy Vigo County Public Library/Vigo County Historical Society
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The future of one of Terre Haute’s longest-running manufacturers clouded last week. Another has shrunk in recent years. Some new plants are launching.
Indiana boasts that it’s the state with the highest percentage of the workforce employed in manufacturing. Is its “Queen City of the Wabash,” Terre Haute, still considered a manufacturing town, long after the heyday of Terre Haute Brewing, Pfizer and Columbia Records?
Maybe. And, if it’s not, that may not be so problematic for the future.
The city’s manufacturing sector absorbed yet another change last week when Columbian Home Products sent a mandatory notice of layoffs to the Indiana Department of Workforce Development. Dick Ryan, the company’s CEO and chairman, told the Tribune-Star current talks could result in a sale of the plant, but if no buyer is found, it will close by year’s end. Eighty-two employees would lose their jobs.
Workers have made kitchenware — pots, pans coated with its distinctive “Graniteware” pattern — at the Beech Street factory on the city’s north side since 1902. Longtime Hauteans identify the plant by its former names — Columbian Enameling and Stamping, and General Housewares. Terre Haute was once its corporate headquarters.
Times and market structures have changed, though. The products remain successful, Ryan said. Yet, operating a stand-along home products plant, in a structure the size of Terre Haute’s, isn’t as economically viable today, Ryan said.
Other local legacy employers have been hit by market forces, too. Late last year, Sony — which once employed 1,200 people — laid off 375 of its 680 remaining workers. Newcomers have stepped in, though, as pointed out by Steve Witt, Vigo County’s economic development point man for the past three decades.
Three manufacturers are investing a combined $99 million, creating 355 new jobs. Those include pet food maker Saturn Petcare, turkey hatchery Select Genetics, and rubber and plastic materials supplier Pyrolyx. Also, Steel Dynamics has taken over the former Heartland Steel/CSN plant.
In terms of factory jobs, “We’re not tied to one big manufacturer,” Witt said. “I think that will help us weather any future storms.”
Some economists anticipate an economic downturn within the next two years, especially in Midwest manufacturing. Indiana and Wisconsin, two leading manufacturing states, have fewer factory jobs today than a year ago, according to Michael Hicks, director of Ball State University’s Center for Business and Economic Research.
“The good news is that manufacturing employment nationwide is so small that a manufacturing-led recession may not push the nation into a full-blown recession,” Hicks said last week. “The bad news, for Indiana and the Midwest in general, is that we are very manufacturing intensive. It will feel like a recession here, even if the nation as a whole is spared.”
One of every 10 private-sector jobs nationally is in manufacturing. In Indiana, 17.7% of the population works a manufacturing job, or almost one of every six, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Terre Haute falls in between, with 13.2% of its workforce in manufacturing.
But Terre Haute lags both the state and nation in manufacturing job growth. From 2015 to last year, manufacturing jobs grew by 4% nationally and 5% in Indiana, but have declined slightly in Vigo County. In 2015, the Vigo manufacturing workforce totaled 48,480 people. That number slipped to 48,312 by 2018.
“From that perspective, you could say we’re not doing as well as statewide or nationally,” said Kevin Christ, associate professor of economics at Rose-Hulman.
Viewed through that lens, “I don’t know that Terre Haute has been a manufacturing town for quite a while,” Christ said. The top four employers in Vigo County today come from the health care and education fields — Union Hospital (2,118 workers), Vigo County School Corp. (2,088), Indiana State University (1,536) and Regional Hospital (854), according to the Terre Haute Economic Development Corp.
Christ annually co-authors the Terre Haute metro area’s economic forecast for the Indiana Business Research Center at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, along with Indiana State University economics professor Robert Guell. They’re in the midst of preparing their outlook for 2020.
A recession in 2020 or 2021 wouldn’t surprise Guell, but he’s not expecting one. Still, a national downturn in manufacturing would be felt strongly here. Even with a diverse manufacturing sector locally, and a large share of jobs in typically recession-proof sectors like health care and education, Terre Haute still could be vulnerable, as it was during the Great Recession that hit in 2007 and lingered for years.
“The bad thing about education being the thing we pin our hopes to is the number of late-elementary and middle school kids that exist right now in the Wabash Valley has to be a record low,” Guell said. The VCSC enrollment has shrunk by 2,241 students since fall of 2006.
Two county-wide referendums on the 2019 Terre Haute municipal election ballot will have some economic ramifications if approves or rejected by voters. One would allow a local casino. The other would raise property taxes to support rising security and mental health staffing costs in Vigo schools, and bring starting-teacher salaries up to competitive levels in the region.
A casino will boost jobs in the short-term through its construction, Guell pointed out, but he sees the longer-term economic impact of a casino as neither a boon nor a bust. The school funding referendum won’t be as significant economically as another coming in May 2021. That one will involve a tax increase to pay for renovation of aging schools. Its outcome could effect future manufacturers’ decisions to open up shop in Terre Haute, just as Columbian Enameling did 117 years ago.
“If we turn that one down, I would be hard-pressed to predict we’d have an easy time finding new employers to replace the ones that leave,” Guell said.
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