EVANSVILLE, Ind. (WEHT)- If the walls of the former Hercules and Servel factory that caught fire early Monday morning could talk– oh the tales they’d share of Evansville’s industrial past, from being the center of the buggy industry- to becoming an early center for automobiles, plastics, and refrigeration, to Evansville’s role in the home front during the Second World War.
Even now, after a fire ravaged the facility built just after the turn of the 20th century, local historians say Tri-Staters shouldn’t soon forget what the warehouses meant to Evansville’s past.
During World War Two, the factory was one of several scattered around Evansville, producing everything from refrigeration units, to shell casings, to thousands and thousands of wings for warplanes. In fact, Dona Bone with the Evansville Wartime Museum says the factory was recognized with an E-Award, given to top defense factories across the nation.
Following the war, the factory returned to domestic production, helping make Evansville a national center for refrigerators- a distinction that included a shortlived college football bowl game played at the Reitz Bowl on the city’s west side.
Over time, though, local historian Stan Schmitt says the heavy industry that had powered began leaving Evansville in the late 1960s and 1970s, and businesses started to contract. Just as Bucyrus-Erie closed on the Westside, archives from the University of Southern Indiana indicate Servel eventually closed in the late 1950s.
Schmitt says these once formidable factories transitioned yet again for light business and warehousing, or they simply sat vacant for years. Schmitt notes that the buildings themselves were largely too big and costly to tear down, so they remained as much a part of the city as anything else.
While Dona Bone is quick to point out Evansville still has several factories from the war effort, including the former Whirlpool and Republic Aviation facility near Evansville Regional Airport, Schmitt says the fire is, in a way, symbolic of Evansville’s industrial decline- saying “those companies have disappeared now, you don’t see those large industrial factories around here anymore.”
