The parts trade as manufacture: what Mishawaka made for other men's cars

The makers' own engines · Ball Band's automobile goods 1934 — 1939 · the tests that fail

The makers' own component work: The first parts manufacture in this record is inside the makers' own entries. The Simplex Motor Car Company's two-stroke engine was its own design and its own manufacture — the valveless motor was the company, and the Mishawaka works existed to build it; the Gillette succession likewise turned on an engine, the rotary sleeve-valve design its makers persisted with in 1916. The Kenworthy stands as the deliberate counterpoint: an assembled car whose specification sheet names Continental, Columbia, Bosch, Westinghouse and Exide — Mishawaka assembly of other houses' components, documented as such in its own entry. Both kinds of manufacture are the record; they are not the same kind, and this section does not blur them.

Ball Band's automobile goods, at documented size: The city's largest documented automobile-component production belongs not to the brass era but to the rubber works on the river. The Ball Band factory monument's record, as the marker text carries it, dates the lines: coated fabrics from 1934 — the line that produced Vinylite and Naugahyde — were used for automobile seating; Koylon foam, produced from 1937, went into automotive cushions; and the auto-mat business, begun in 1939, employed nearly 200 workers at the Mishawaka factory, its rubber and vinyl mats going into vehicles produced by Studebaker, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. The federal court record fixes the scale in the company's own accounting: in the 1955 trademark proceedings over the red-ball mark, the record recites that the Mishawaka company had sold, under its marks, 500 million dollars in footwear and five million dollars in rubber floor mats and cushions for automobiles. The rubber works' whole course — Mishawaka Woolen, United States Rubber, Uniroyal, the 1997 closing — stands in the Ball Band file of this build; what stands here is its automobile dimension, which is a parts-maker's record of three decades' standing.

The tire test, negative: Ball Band made no tires in any source reached, and the one court record that puts the company's name beside pneumatic tires proves the point by its posture: in the 1955 case the tire goods — pneumatic tires, inner tubes and rim liners — are the Czechoslovak Bata company's, against whose mark the Mishawaka company was opposing on the strength of its footwear and its automobile mats and cushions. The city's rubber works supplied the industry's floors and seats, not its wheels. The vulcanizing shops and tire agencies that did serve Mishawaka's motorists are sellers and services, and stand in the Dealerships section.

Dodge and Wheelabrator, at anchor: The two great metal houses were tested for automobile-component production and the test is printed at the strength the record supports. Dodge Manufacturing's documented catalogue — the split pulleys, clutches, shafting, hangers and gearing of its institutional history, read whole in the Businesses section — is power-transmission equipment for factories; no automobile-component line appears in it, and the company's founding product, Wallace Dodge's Magic Jack, was a wagon jack, made for horse-drawn vehicles from 1878. Dodge's record is therefore negative for automobile parts, at anchor, with the house itself standing whole in Businesses — and with the standing clarification that this Dodge is not the automobile company of the same name. Wheelabrator's place in the automobile economy is real but indirect: its shot-blasting process, developed on the old Amplex ground after 1926, cleans castings, and the foundries it equipped included the industry's own; the equipment record is Businesses' whole, and no automobile component was manufactured by the firm itself in the record reached. One further name from the 1920 industrial pages is printed at its size: the Acme Machine Company of Mishawaka advertised in the News-Times of that year as manufacturers of dies, jigs, tools and general machine work — a tooling shop of the kind the industry everywhere depended on, with no automobile-specific work documented for it in the sources read.

Sources:

1. Ball-Band Factory historical marker (erected 2014; text as carried by the Historical Marker Database), read first-hand — coated fabrics from 1934 and their automobile-seating use; Koylon foam from 1937 in automotive cushions; the auto-mat business from 1939, nearly 200 workers, mats used in vehicles of Studebaker, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler; the works' course to the 1997 closing.
2. Mishawaka Rubber and Woolen Mfg. Co. v. Bata Narodni Podnik, 222 F.2d 279 (C.C.P.A. 1955), read first-hand — the record's recital of $500,000,000 in footwear and $5,000,000 in rubber floor mats and cushions for automobiles sold under the company's marks; the pneumatic-tire goods in the case identified as the opposing applicant's.
3. The Businesses section of this history — Dodge Manufacturing's catalogue and course, and the Wheelabrator works on the Amplex ground, in full; the anchor statements above are drawn from that file's record.
4. South Bend News-Times, 16 September 1920 (Hoosier State Chronicles), read first-hand — the Acme Machine Company advertisement, "Manufacturers of Dies, Jigs, Tools and General Machine Work, Mishawaka, Ind."