Manufacturing Belt

Dynamics and Geography

When industrialization first gripped Canada and the United States, manufacturing took the form of many small establishments located in the Atlantic coast states and along the St. Lawrence River. These early enterprises were closely entwined with rural activities and added factory work to an industrializing countryside. Subsequent migration and urbanization, westward frontier expansion, and railroad and telegraph construction fueled industrial development within a westward-expanding industrial belt. In the American South, there was a relative retardation of industrial development because of weaker urbanization, limited investment in transport and communications infrastructure or farm mechanization, and a very different labor market. By 1870, industrial activity already covered the area subsequently known as the Manufacturing Belt, marked by Minneapolis and St. Louis in the west, Toronto and Montreal in the north, and Louisville, Cincinnati, and Baltimore in the south. In the period from 1860 to 1880, however, manufacturers in this region became functionally integrated into a continental geography of labor, market, and resource supply regions. By 1880, specialized establishments supplied products to wide market territories within the continent, factories depended on the skilled workers of well-developed urban labor markets, while their suppliers included not only mines, lumber mills, cotton gins, and grain elevators located outside the belt but also factories located in other industrial cities. Thus, the belt was formed through a process of regional specialization.

A spatially differentiated process of cumulative causation, operating on a continental scale, produced local and regional specializations within the belt on the back of initial advantages. Clear signs of manufacturing specialization are discernible even in 1880. The leading metropolitan centers for manufacturing each had disproportionate shares of national employment in specific industries: In New York, it was garment production; in Philadelphia, textile production; and in Chicago, slaughterhouses and meat packing. Other local specializations included fruit and vegetable canning in Baltimore; musical instruments in Boston; furniture in Grand Rapids; tobacco in Louisville; glass, iron, and steel in Pittsburgh; and agricultural implements in Springfield, Ohio. A high-tech region emerged in New England associated with the American system of production, featuring interchangeable parts production and focused on the U.S. armories in Springfield, Massachusetts.

The belt developed a distinctive geography: An array of industrial regions comprising outer-ring cities and industrial towns clustered around metropolitan centers. Metropolitan centers provided finance, wholesale, warehouse, and transport services for manufacturers and served as innovation centers and information nodes. As early as 1880, 15 regional metropolises and 50 other industrial cities, all located in the belt, dominated U.S. manufacturing. A similar pattern emerged in Canada, where Toronto and Montreal, along with the many industrial cities, such as Hamilton and London, that constitute the Windsor-Quebec corridor, housed around 70% of national manufacturing employment for most of the 20th century. These industrial cities were distinctive: Their layout and pattern of development contrasts strongly with the newer metropolitan centers of the South and the West, such as Los Angeles, Phoenix, Houston, Denver, or Calgary. Specialized industrial districts emerged within the metropolitan cores. Some were keyed to major assembly operations, as at the Baldwin Locomotive Works in Philadelphia, which subcontracted parts production to adjacent suppliers in a way that enabled large-scale assembly of locomotives. Others featured the rental of machines and factory spaces to numerous enterprises, as in the Philadelphia textile industry. Yet others were the result of regulations concerning polluting industries and water rights, or localized agglomeration economies, such as those related to New York or Toronto garment manufacture. Historical geographers have been reinterpreting the dynamics, patterns, and causes of the suburbanization of manufacturing within metropolitan areas. This is largely because industrial facilities and associated [Page 1822]residential areas tended to be scattered 10 to 40 kilometres around major centers before the residential growth engulfed them. The belt featured diverse industrial and urban locales set in a dominant landscape of farms and forests, including satellite industrial towns, company towns, single-industry resource towns with processing industries, and small-factory villages. Workshops remained important even with the development of factory organization, machinofacture, and wage work. Thus, the belt's internal diversity complicates the metro-centered region model.

...