Seventy Years of Stamping in Marion
A community open house on July 31 marks 70 years of GM Marion Stamping. The milestone is worth more than a party.
On Friday, July 31, General Motors and UAW Local 977 will open the gates at 2400 W. Second St. for a Community Open House and Family Day marking 70 years of stamping in Marion. Admission is free. The event runs from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., and the last guided plant tour begins at 6 p.m.
The Grant County Economic Growth Council (GCEGC) will be there as one of the participating community partners, and we hope to see you there. But before the plant tours and the food trucks, the number itself deserves a moment of attention. Seventy years of continuous operation at a single site is not a small thing, and in this industry, it is not a given.
What It Takes to Last 70 Years
The plant opened in 1956 as Fisher Body, GM's longtime body-building division. Today it operates as the Marion Stamping, producing sheet metal stampings, blanks and sub-assemblies that ship to GM assembly plants throughout North America, supporting Chevrolet, Buick, GMC and Cadillac vehicles. If you have driven a GM vehicle in the last several decades, there is a reasonable chance that part of it passed through Marion first.
Longevity like that is not automatic. It is the compounding result of a lot of unglamorous things going right over a long period: a site that stayed viable, a workforce that stayed skilled, a location that stayed logistically sound just off Interstate 69, and a company that kept choosing to reinvest here rather than somewhere else.
That last point is worth dwelling on. In 2022, GM announced a $491 million investment in the Marion facility - two new press lines, press and die upgrades, and a building addition - to prepare the plant for future products, including electric vehicles. The state offered an incentive package alongside it. That decision was not made because of sentiment. It was made because the site, the workforce, and the supply chain penciled out.
This is what economic development work is about. Site readiness, workforce pipelines, and supplier networks are not abstractions. They are the things that determine whether a company reinvests in your community or writes it off.
What This Milestone Means Right Now
We are marking this anniversary at a genuinely difficult moment for the sector. As we covered earlier this year in our look at Indiana's 2026 economic outlook,manufacturing employment across the state has been declining and is forecast to soften further. Tariffs have driven up input costs for steel and aluminum. Manufacturers report they are delaying expansions and hiring more cautiously, even as they continue to struggle to find skilled production workers.
Set against that backdrop, an anniversary is not just a celebration. It is evidence. It tells prospective employers, site selectors and our own residents something specific: that Grant County can host advanced manufacturing at scale, and sustain it across market cycles, technology shifts and generations of workers.
It also tells us where the work is. A plant does not stay open for 70 years without people running it. The single most common thing we hear from manufacturers in this county is that they cannot find enough skilled workers. That is the gap we spend most of our time trying to close, and it is the reason a family day at a stamping plant is more strategically useful than it might appear. Some of the children walking that floor on July 31 will be the ones deciding, a decade from now, whether a career in manufacturing is for them.
What to Expect on July 31
The open house is free, family-friendly, and open to the public. Alongside guided plant tours, GM has planned:
A Marion Health display featuring hands-on robotics and its mobile simulation trailer
A remote-control car activity presented by Next Gen RC & Hobby of Huntington
The Kokomo Fire Department's smoke house, a kid-friendly lesson in fire safety and escape planning
Hair tinsel and face paint by Hive Mind Market
Food trucks, including Maucky's, Milabelle's Ice Cream, and Obi's
More than 20 local businesses and organizations, including our team
If you plan to tour the plant, note the requirements: closed-toe shoes, long pants, and shirts with sleeves that cover the shoulders. Safety glasses, cut sleeves, and ear plugs are required on the floor and will be provided at the plant. The minimum age for plant tours is 8. GM reserves the right to deny plant access for safety reasons.
Come See It For Yourself
Most people in Grant County have driven past that plant a thousand times. Comparatively few have been inside it.
Seventy years of work happened behind those doors, and many of the people who did the work will be standing right there. Go say hello.