Industry History | Cummins — The Cerealine Floor Before the Jackson Street Campus
· 1919-2
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Industry History | Cummins — The Cerealine Floor Before the Jackson Street Campus
kevin
People treat Cummins as a glass campus that always built highway diesels.
The first engines were assembled in a former cereal mill.
On 3 February 1919 Clessie Lyle Cummins incorporated the Cummins Engine Company in Columbus, Indiana. He was thirty. William G. Irwin, the banker whose family he had chauffeured, put up the capital to license a Hvid oil engine.
Cummins had already outgrown Irwin's garage. In 1918 he took five thousand square feet on the first floor of the Cerealine Building, a brick mill that had once made a dry breakfast cereal of the same name.
The first Cummins-built unit, completed in April 1919, was a six-horsepower hopper-cooled engine with a five-inch bore and a seven-inch stroke, turning at six hundred revolutions per minute.
Early sales went through the Sears catalogue toward farms. The highway diesel that later defined the company was still years away. The firm did not record a profit until 1937.
In 1926 Cummins moved production to a former Reeves plant at Fifth and Wilson Streets, a site that remains an engine plant. The Cerealine brick stayed in downtown Columbus.
When J. Irwin Miller, Irwin's great-nephew, commissioned a new headquarters, Kevin Roche built the 1983 corporate office around that mill. The old brick is now the cafeteria inside a precast-and-glass frame at 500 Jackson Street.
A public park occupies the east side of the lot. From the sidewalk a visitor can see the four-story Cerealine block sitting in the newer campus, which is the honest picture of the founding: a licensed oil engine in a reused mill, not a research park.
Cummins is still headquartered in Columbus. The ticker is CMI. The first floor where those 1919 engines were numbered is the same brick a walker sees from Jackson Street.
Photo: WhisperToMe, Wikimedia Commons.
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