The maker test: three Mishawaka names in the registers

The test and its result · the registers read 1906 — 1920

The test as set: A marque is counted as Mishawaka-made only where the trade and manufacturing record seats its manufacture in Mishawaka — a register entry, a trade-book specification sheet, a period advertisement or a works history. Dealer agencies, however old, are the Dealerships section's ground and prove nothing here. The standard marque register read first-hand for this test is G. R. Doyle's The World's Automobiles (second edition, 1957), whose American list is a maker's list: it names the car, the company and the place of manufacture.

What Doyle's register holds: Searching the full text of Doyle for "Mishawaka" returns exactly three entries, and they are the Story of Mishawaka section of this section. First: "American Simplex. — Simplex Motor Car Co. — Mishawaka, Ind." Second: "Amplex. (11) — Simplex Motor Car Co.; Gillette Motors Co. — Mishawaka, Ind." — the register's numbered note 11, in Doyle's own key, reading "Valveless. Succeeding American Simplex. 1916 car called Gillette." Third: "Kenworthy.* — Kenworthy Motors of New England, Inc. — Boston; Mishawaka, Ind." — the asterisk Doyle's own, printed as he prints it. No fourth Mishawaka entry stands in the register. The state survey agrees at its own strength: the Indiana Historical Society's Traces survey of the state's automobile industry counts more than eighty Indiana cities and towns that manufactured or assembled automobiles, and names Mishawaka among the Indiana towns that had produced automobiles by 1920.

The correction this requires: The dealerships file of this build states, in its introduction, that "Mishawaka never built cars in the brass era." That sentence was written from the sellers' record, in which it is true that no maker appears — by the trade's first full directory census of 1921 the Amplex era was six years over and the Kenworthy's single documented year had passed, and the census found only sellers. Against the marque record the sentence does not stand, and the entries below print the record that displaces it. The correction is flagged for the assembly in this section's pass note; the dealerships file is not silently rewritten from here.

The name-traps, killed in advance: Three confusions run through this record and are disposed of once, here. The Mishawaka Simplex is not the New York Simplex: the Simplex Automobile Company of New York (the Smith & Mabley firm) built a different, larger car, and it is New York's car, not Mishawaka's, that motoring memory usually means by "Simplex" — the confusion is the very reason the Mishawaka car was renamed, and it reaches into the first Indianapolis 500, where both companies' cars ran, as the racing entry below sets out. The Dodge Manufacturing Company of Mishawaka, the power-transmission house, is not Dodge Brothers the automobile maker; no Dodge automobile was ever built in Mishawaka, a point the dealerships file also prints. And the Kenworthy of Mishawaka is not the Kenworth of Seattle, the truck maker founded in 1923 out of the Gerlinger works — a different name, a different company, a different trade, three years later and a continent away.

Sources:

1. Doyle, The World's Automobiles, 2nd edition (1957), full text read first-hand (Internet Archive) — the three Mishawaka entries quoted verbatim above, and Doyle's key to numbered commentary, note 11, on the Amplex entry.
2. Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History, vol. 6 no. 2 (Indiana Historical Society, 1994), the issue's automobile-industry survey read first-hand — more than eighty Indiana towns manufacturing or assembling automobiles; Mishawaka named among the towns that had produced automobiles by 1920.
3. The Dealerships section of this history — the 1921 directory census (two sellers) and the sentence corrected above, quoted from that file as banked.