The company that built Buchanan, and the offices it left behind

A drill company moved to Buchanan in 1904 for a deal the town couldn’t lose: free rent and cheap power, dangled by the local chamber of commerce to lure a factory. The bet paid off for the better part of a century. That little drill maker grew into Clark Equipment, and for decades Clark was Buchanan.

Clark made axles — the heavy ones under trucks and, during World War II, under tanks. From there it built loaders, scrapers, and the forklifts that moved freight in warehouses everywhere. It even brought the Bobcat skid-steer into its fold, the squat little loader you still see on construction sites. By the 1960s Clark ranked among the hundred largest companies in America, and its Buchanan plant alone put more than 3,500 people to work. In a town this size, that’s most of the paychecks. The company name was on the ball fields and the bowling leagues.

Then it ended the way a lot of Midwest industry ended. The recessions of the early 1980s squeezed the profits, factories closed, and Clark shut its Buchanan operations in 1983. A town built around one employer had to figure out what came next — a hard stretch that a lot of southwest Michigan went through about the same time.

What survived is the front office. The Clark Equipment Company Administrative Complex, a cluster of buildings along East Dewey Street and North Red Bud Trail, went onto the National Register of Historic Places in 2023 — recognition that this quiet handful of brick buildings was once the brain of a global manufacturer. Drive past today and it’s easy to miss. But for eighty years, this was the address where a company that started with a free-rent handshake decided what the rest of the world’s warehouses would run on.