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Full-fashioned hosiery · The “Wayne Knit” mills
On the record
Founded: spring 1891, Fort Wayne. The Immigrant Entrepreneurship biography (from Thieme’s own papers), the History Center, ACGSI and the News-Sentinel all agree on 1891, and the Fort Wayne City Directory 1891–92 lists “Wayne Knitting Mills, n e cor E Main and Clinton” — the firm existed at Main and Clinton in 1891–92. Starting capital was $30,000; production began that summer with twenty-five German-immigrant knitters and finishers. Conflict flagged, not followed: two ACGSI / ARCH passages claim a Thieme Brothers knitting mill at the Growth Avenue site c.1875 on the sources in hand: Thieme was 18 in 1875 and then training as a druggist.
Founder: Theodore Frederick Thieme (7 February 1857 – 11 August 1949). A Fort Wayne druggist who sold his drug-store interest after the McKinley Tariff of 1890, toured the Chemnitz hosiery district in Saxony travelling incognito as “Herr Gross” to get past German makers’ fears of American competition, and bought German full-fashioned machines and recruited Chemnitz knitters for Fort Wayne.
What it did: manufactured full-fashioned hosiery — stockings knitted to the contours of the leg, not seamless tubes — for men, women and children under the “Wayne Knit” brand, slogan “American Made for American Trade.” Children’s hosiery was made from 1898 by the separate United Knitting Mills (entry 33) and silk hosiery from 1909 by the Thieme Brothers subsidiary (entry 34). In World War I the factory produced 50,000 standard-issue woollen army socks.
Course: after a year in rented quarters at Main and Clinton the mill set up permanently at West Main Street and Growth Avenue — “Knitters Avenue” — operating there 1892–1960. Capital rose to $250,000 in the late 1890s with New York investment; its exhibit, with a working full-fashioned machine, took top honours at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Size figures conflict by date and are not merged: about 1,100 workers by 1905, about 2,500 at its height, one of Fort Wayne’s largest employers of women, with an extensive welfare-capitalism programme — profit sharing, group insurance, a clubhouse and dormitories for women workers.
Fate: sold to Munsingwear, 1923; Fort Wayne mill closed 1960, with the 1923 sale told two ways and both carried. Thieme broke off sale talks in 1922 as unfair to trade, employees, stockholders and the city; while he was in Florida, company officials Samuel Foster and Henry Miller assembled 80 percent of the stock and the board sold the company without him — his farewell message of 18 June 1923 calls it a secret conspiracy, and the misappropriation charges against him were later cleared by auditors. Thieme Brothers Hosiery was not in the sale. The mill ran on as Wayne Knit, declined as silk gave way to synthetics, and closed in 1960, operations transferred to Humboldt, Tennessee.
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- § 05 — business
Sources: Immigrant Entrepreneurship (German Historical Institute), “Theodore Frederick Thieme” — https://www.immigrantentrepreneurship.org/entries/theodore-frederick-thieme/ ; Nancy Brown, Indiana Magazine of History 112 (March 2016) — https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/imh/article/download/24710/30732/58137 ; News-Sentinel Cityscapes, “Fort Wayne Knitters,” 14 Nov 1982 — http://egen.fortwayne.com/ns/projects/history/scapes30.php ; ACGSI / Allen INGenWeb — https://www.acgsi.org/genweb/fort-wayne/wayne-knitting-mills-allen-county-indiana.html ; History Center virtual exhibit — https://www.fwhistorycenter.org/virtual-exhibits/vex18/0EF2149A-7CF7-47FC-9BA9-253211406770.htm . Sources as cited in the profile.