The industrial buildings at survey size

1878–PRESENT · THE FIRMS' RECORDS ARE THE BUSINESSES LEG'S

The division: Mishawaka's great works — Dodge, Ball Band, the brewery, the power plant, AM General — stand whole in the businesses record and the two flagship fragments of this history, and their buildings' courses are told there. This article carries the industrial fabric at survey size only: the masses, the grounds, and what physically remains.

The Dodge ground: The Dodge Manufacturing works on South Union Street filled, by 1902, forty buildings across sixty-five acres, on the businesses record — the largest single built complex of the city's pulley age. Its ground today divides between survival and remediation: a foundry still works at 500 South Union Street, the state's 1999 Dodge marker standing at its parking lot and entrance, while the foundry ground itself carries a $500,000 Environmental Protection Agency and Indiana Brownfields subgrant approved in 2026, on the businesses record — the nineteenth-century works' soil, addressed in the twenty-first century. The works' founder has his own marker in the city besides: the Wallace H. Dodge marker on Union Street north of East Seventh, where Dodge founded his company in 1878, moved to the site in 1880, and patented the wood split pulley in 1882.

The Ball Band ground: The Ball Band works at the river bend — the rubber and footwear plant whose arc the flagship fragment owns — filled forty-three acres at its height. No building of it stands: the plant closed for good in 1997, five of its large vacant brick buildings were imploded on 17 June 2000, and the remaining demolition finished the clearance. The ground is Beutter Riverfront Park today, the workers' monument and the painted sneaker standing where the red ball was made, and The Mill at Ironworks Plaza at its edge — the demolition ledger below carries the implosion whole. The brewery, the one great works whose buildings survive at complex scale, stands in its own article above; the buildings' survival there is the exception that measures the rule.

Twin Branch and the vehicle plants: On the river's east reach stands the Twin Branch complex: the dam and the hydroelectric plant whose first power came on 16 December 1903 — the oldest hydroelectric plant in its present owner's fleet on the businesses record, still generating — while the steam plant that stood with it shut in June 1978, and the landmark's own summary, quoted in the businesses record, remembers a plant that "once powered the entire city of Mishawaka and beyond." The vehicle works stand at anchor size only: AM General's two Mishawaka plants, Plant 1 and Plant 2 on the Chippewa Avenue ground, carried whole in the flagship fragment of that name — the buildings among the largest single-story industrial masses in the city's record, and the record of their contracts and successions the fragment's own. The industrial city's physical residue, surveyed whole, is this: one brewery standing, one foundry working, one dam generating, two vehicle plants in service, and forty-three acres of park where the biggest works of all stood until a June morning in 2000.

Sources:

1. The businesses record of this history — the Dodge works' forty buildings and sixty-five acres by 1902, the 500 South Union foundry and its 2026 brownfields subgrant, the Twin Branch course of 1903 and 1978 and the fleet standing, carried whole there.
2. The Ball Band flagship fragment of this history — the works' closure, the implosion of 17 June 2000 and the forty-three acres, carried whole there.
3. Indiana Historical Bureau, marker 71.1999.1 — the Dodge marker's siting at the surviving foundry; the marker database for the Wallace H. Dodge marker on Union Street.
4. The AM General flagship fragment of this history — the two plants and their present service, at anchor here.