Technology History | Huron Campus, Endicott — Where IBM Began, and What Is Left of It

On the last day of 2024, wrecking crews started on the buildings where IBM began.

Harlow Bundy moved his International Time Recording Company into a new brick factory on North Street here in the middle of the 1900s — the exact year is not agreed, with accounts giving 1904 for the start of construction and 1905, 1906 or 1907 for the building itself.

In 1911 that firm was folded with two others into the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, which renamed itself International Business Machines in 1924. IBM's own site calls Endicott Plant No. 1.

Thomas Watson ran the place from 1914 and used it to invent a company's self-image. Next door, Endicott-Johnson's tanneries worked out of plain red brick; Watson put his people in white concrete and glass block, and added a schoolhouse, a cafeteria and a swimming pool.

The word THINK went up on the walls. The first big government contract came in 1935, running the accounts of the new Social Security system, and at its height the operation employed something like seventeen to nineteen thousand people across the Triple Cities.

IBM sold the site in 2002 and gave up its last offices here around 2023. The five buildings that came down in 2025 held 550,000 square feet and had stood empty since 2007.

Two things happened during the demolition worth recording.

In late January the Art Deco "International Business Machines" lettering of 1924, still on the wall of a doomed building, was photographed for the last time; local historians asked whether it could be saved and were told it was not feasible.

Then in March, as crews worked east to west, they uncovered the original Bundy factory — swallowed inside later additions for decades, briefly in daylight again. By August the county executive was describing the site as levelled.

The debris is the part nobody photographs. Thousands of tons of asbestos-laden material still sat under cover here in January 2026, waiting for landfill capacity, more asbestos than the county had buried in the previous eight years.

The other unresolved thing is the water. The village sued IBM in 2025 alleging that decades of operations contaminated the wells supplying its water system; IBM called the action unjustified and said it would fight.

The pin is campus-scale, at 1701 North Street. East of McKinley Avenue is cleared ground awaiting a master plan; west of it, some buildings still carry their old lettering.

The photograph shows one of the survivors, the schoolhouse and clock tower on North Street, with THINK still legible along the parapet.

Sources: WNBF News reporting throughout the 2024-26 demolition; Broome County IDA and Phoenix Investors announcements; Docomomo US and Binghamton University Libraries on Plant No. 1's history. Cover photo: Rosemaryetoufee, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.