The local Dana Holding Corp. plant, a household name in Marion and surrounding areas for decades, started on a foundation dating back to the 1930s and closed down on a foundation expected to take on a new life.
Dana Corp.’s driveshaft component plant was one of the county’s largest and best-paying employers, at least rivaling General Motors, during the manufacturing heyday, said Grant County historian Bill Munn.
“It was very important to the economy of Marion and Grant County,” he said. “GM, RCA and Dana — the real powerhouses.”
Louis Ebert, who works in Marion Public Library’s Indiana Room archives as their local industry expert, said the number of people employed by Dana over time contributed to the community’s familiarity with the Dana name.
“There’s a lot of people that either worked for Dana or knew about Dana over the years,” he said.
Ebert worked in the Dana factory on Boots Street in the summer of 1951, when that plant was under construction. He worked for Moorehead Electric, which he said had the contract to install the electrical motors and electrical switch board panels for machines.
After starting production in Marion in 1950, Dana Corp. employed up to 1,500 people by the late 1970s. Though the Dana factory had been located at 400 S. Miller Ave. since 1952, local production started at a factory on Boots Street in 1950, when Dana Corp. purchased Marion Tool and Engineering Corp. The company had been in business at 111 S. Boots St. since its founding in the 1930s. It produced small tools, except during the World War II years when it manufactured parts for tanks and planes.
Lifelong Marion resident Gary Nall worked for Dana during its peak, from 1966 to 1997, first on production and later going into machine repair. After retiring from Dana, he went on to Chrysler, retiring from there in 2007, but remembers his time at Dana positively.
“The work was hard, but it was a good place to work,” Nall said. “It made me a good living for my family, and I have no regrets going there.”
Nall said he appreciated Dana’s operations more when he moved on to Chrysler, where production didn’t allow time to shut down machines for regular maintenance and cleaning.
“When I went to Chrysler it was a completely new ball game. Dana, as far as I’m concerned, had a whole new quality standard,” he said. “They just demand the higher quality.”
Nall attributed Dana’s standards partly to the names the company supplied, which have included major automotive names like General Motors, Ford, Mack Truck and Peterbilt.
“It was part of Marion’s automotive history,” Munn said of the plant.
The facility grew and boomed as the automotive industry did, Munn said, before the plant started contracting as the manufacturing industry did.
After years of layoffs that preceded and followed Dana Corp.’s 2006 bankruptcy filing, the Marion plant ceased operations in the summer of 2013 and was sold to its new owner in the fall.
The property is now in the hands of a Michigan-based company called AP Marion IN, which is working in conjunction with a related Michigan company called Applied Partners to reincarnate the factory.
Mike Cenit, a managing member of both companies, said he hopes to sell the property to a green energy company after demolishing most of it, leaving the strip of office space intact. Demolition started earlier this month, and Cenit said Friday he expects it to wrap up next month, at which time he would show the finished product to a potential new owner, which he declined to name at this early stage in the deal.
Nall has seen the demolition underway and heard about the plans for the former factory’s use.
“I’m glad they’re going to use the property there,” he said. “It was a good place to work.”