General Electric Specialty Control Plant
General Electric Specialty Control Plant is a historic factory complex located in Waynesboro, Virginia. The property, a former airport, was acquired by General Electric in 1953. The Waynesboro plant was one of some 120 individual operating departments created as part of a decentralization effort by the General Electric Corporation. The Specialty Control Plant was responsible for the development of breakthrough technologies in areas ranging from America's military efforts to space travel to computer technology.
The facility was sold to GENICOM on October 21, 1983. In 2000, GENICOM entered bankruptcy and the building was sold to the newly formed Solutions Way Management. The substantially downsized GENICOM operated as a tenant through its 2003 merger that formed TallyGenicom until a further bankruptcy and dissolution in 2009.
The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2012. Solutions Way Management now rents much of the facility to companies for light manufacturing, warehousing and distribution.
Background
In the early 1950s the General Electric Company was a highly centralized operation with six major manufacturing "works". They were located in Schenectady, New York; Pittsfield, Massachusetts; Lynn, Massachusetts; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Erie, Pennsylvania; and Fort Wayne, Indiana. At that time, under Ralph Cordiner's presidency, a major decentralization occurred whereby larger business groups were divided into individual operating departments, with new plants built in many different locations across the country.The previous Industrial Control Division, located in Schenectady, New York, was subdivided into four such departments. The Industry Control Department, building control systems for large industry such as cranes, steel, paper, marine and submarine panels, and similar segments of industry, was located in Salem, Virginia. The General Purpose Control Department, building smaller control components such as relays and contractors for general industrial applications, was located in Bloomington, Illinois. The Appliance Control Department, building control systems for the company's consumer products; i.e., refrigerators, oil burners, and small switching devices, was located in Morrison, Illinois. Each of these had a common product line sufficient for efficient and viable operation as separate entities, but the Specialty Control Department came to Waynesboro, Virginia with the remaining heterogeneous components of the original Control Division, no one of which could survive as a separate entity.
History
1950s
In 1953, GE purchased the old, no longer used, Waynesboro airport, consisting of 75 acres of land located just west of the Norfolk & Western Railroad. Construction of the new plant to house the Specialty Control Department began, and by the summer of 1954 had reached a point where production of photoelectric devices was begun with the relocation of supervisory personnel from Schenectady.At its peak, the plant produced an extensive and highly varied range of products. A partial list includes:
- Hermetically sealed relays primarily for aerospace and military applications
- Numerical Control Systems for machine tools, with input from tracers, punched tape, punched cards, magnetic tape, and digital switches
- Thy-Mo-Trol and Statotrol adjustable speed drives for the white print industry, winding/loop control, and many others where regulated, but adjustable, speed was required
- Regulators and static exciters for electrical power generation systems
- Photoelectric devices for a wide range of applications, including pinhole detectors, register controls, speed, and loop controls
- The marketing of selsyns for remote indication and control
- Hot-box detectors for detecting over-heated bearings on railroad cars
- Aircraft and military products, including airborne protective panels, static exciters, regulators, military ground power supplies, regulators and amplidyne regulators, and, the power supply for the Lunar Excursion Module of the early moon probe
- Machinery Automation systems that included weighing systems, test and inspection systems, and automated material control systems
- Width gages for sheet steel using nuclear radiation
This diversity meant the department was in a better position to weather the ups and downs of the normal business cycles that occurred over the years, requiring fewer layoffs and having a leveling effect on GE's and the local area's economic stability, than its sister departments from the Industrial Control Division spin-off. The Specialty Control Department was the only GE component that turned a profit in the first year of its move.
In 1958, a major crisis occurred when Senator Harry Byrd, who controlled politics in Virginia, launched a program of massive resistance to the integration of blacks and whites, with the result that most public schools in Virginia were closed. Because 10,000 children had no means of public education, private schools began to be formed. Specialty Control felt that this was an issue that should be addressed. Dr. L.T. Rader, General Manager of the Specialty Control, representing the GE plants in Virginia gave many talks on the subject, mainly in northern Virginia, and argued that no Fortune 500 company would continue to operate in Virginia if the state's segregation policy continued.
The governor appointed a legislative committee to study the matter, and they recommended that the State cease its resistance to integration. The recommendation was put to a vote in the Virginia Assembly and it passed by one vote. This was the first time that the GE presence in Virginia took an active part in the State's political activity.
1960s and 1970s
In the late 1960s, the Terminet product line was first offered. Terminet was a line of printer terminals that used solid-state technology and printed circuit boards, and offered an alternative technology in the computer and business data field that was then dominated primarily by Teletype.At this time, major development was undertaken to design a non-impact printing technology to compete with laser printers. General Electric's Research and Development group in Schenectady, New York, prepared the initial concepts. The new printer was to become Terminet 8000, printing 8000 lines per minute. At that time printers were operating at 300 to 600 lines per minute and could produce 6 to 9 copies at a time. In order for this new single-ply technology to compete, a speed of at least ten times 600 lines per minute was adopted. The technology incorporated in it was so far ahead of its time that the Terminet 8000 never made it to market.
During the late 1970s, GE rivaled Dupont as the largest employer in the Waynesboro area, with a peak of 3,200 employees. However, this period also saw the Specialty Control Plant shrinking in size. The aircraft business had already been transferred to other GE plants located in Johnson City, New York, and Erie, Pennsylvania. By 1974, the adjustable speed drives business had been transferred to GE's plant in Erie, Pennsylvania. The photoelectric business was absorbed by the General Purpose Control Department in Bloomington, Illinois, and the power systems components, consisting of static exciters and power regulators, were transferred to the Industry Control Department in Salem, Virginia. Specialty Control was now reduced to the Terminet printers and the relay business.
1980s and 1990s
In 1981, seeing no long-term viability in high-speed impact printers, GE made preparations to sell both the relay and the printer businesses. The buyout was completed in October 1983. A new company was formed with the name Genicom Corporation. This new venture included both relays and printers, but it emphasized the printer market under the direction of Curtis Powell as CEO. Genicom was quite successful in its early operations, and its stock went public in 1987–8.In 1994, Genicom internally reorganized into two separate companies: Enterprising Solutions Services Company and Document Solutions Company. ESSC was highly successful, and eventually serviced all makes of printer and printer-related products. Much of the Waynesboro service operation moved to a specialty-built warehouse for the business in Louisville, Kentucky. However, GENICOM struggled as impact printer technology began to be replaced by the laser print engine and ink jet technology. It found the market for printer technology to be increasingly hostile, as the new technologies were almost completely patented by others, and a license was required to build them.
In the early 1990s, GENICOM eventually sold the relay business to CII Technology, a group of venture capitalists that were combining all such manufacturers into one operation in North Carolina. It made several attempts to buy/merge with other companies already in the printer technology field, but these efforts were ultimately unsuccessful. On March 10, 2000, Genicom declared bankruptcy. On July 17, 2001, a group of venture capitalists, Sun Capital Corporation, bought the printer division of the bankrupt company for $9.3 million, and its name became Genicom LLC. It was then resold in 2003.
A very narrow portion of the printer line continued to be built under the name Genicom LP. Northrop Grumman Information Technology took over the parts and service operations of Genicom printers existing in the field under the name Genicom, PLC, and it now operates as an on-line Customer Service Center in a portion of the Waynesboro Outlet Village.
2000s
A merger of Tally, a manufacturer of computer printers, and the residual parts of GENICOM was announced on August 3, 2003, under the name Tally-Genicom. Tally-Genicom continued the design and manufacturing support of dot-matrix and shuttle-matrix printers in a portion of the former Specialty Control Plant site. Its corporate headquarters are still located in Chantilly, Virginia.Solutions Way Management, LLC, a subsidiary of Allied Realty, Co., as part of the 2001 GENICOM bankruptcy settlement, purchased the former GE Specialty Control Plant property for $750,000. It now operates the site as an incubator for fledgling new businesses, providing manufacturing space and offering support services as required.