Ball Band in Mishawaka: The Woolen Mill That Put a Red Ball on America's Feet

Ball Band · The Woolen Mill That Put a Red Ball on America's Feet

For a hundred and thirty years the largest fact in Mishawaka was a factory on the river. A small wooden woolen mill stood by the dam from about 1838, four years after the town was founded; in 1867 Jacob Beiger and his son Martin bought it, and the Mishawaka Woolen Manufacturing Company began the course that made the place. The company's first fortune was a boot: the all-knit wool boot that Martin V. Beiger and Adolphus Eberhart brought out in 1886, the first wool boot that held its shape, which carried a black band at its top and then, from 1891, a red ball — the mark registered with the BALL-BAND name in 1901 and known in every lumber camp and schoolyard in America. In 1897 the woolen company did a harder thing and became a rubber company too, building a rubber mill under a borrowed Goodyear superintendent, E. A. Saunders, and washing its first crude rubber on Christmas Day of that year. By the 1920s the works — a subsidiary of the United States Rubber Company from 1922, renamed the Mishawaka Rubber and Woolen Manufacturing Company in 1923 — covered some forty-three acres of downtown Mishawaka and employed five thousand people across a dozen product lines. In the Second World War it employed more than nine thousand, built the secret fuel tanks that let Doolittle's raiders reach Tokyo, and put raincoats on soldiers and diving suits on sailors. After the war it made Red Ball Jets for the nation's children, missile insulation for Minuteman and Polaris, and fuel cells for jets not yet retired. The ending was not one blow but two, twenty-nine years apart: the footwear that had made the name was transferred away in 1968–70, in a phase-out whose conduct produced one of the landmark sex-discrimination cases in American law, and the plant that remained worked on until 1997, when the doors closed for good. The fifty-eight buildings came down, five of them by dynamite before six thousand watchers in June 2000, and the ground is a riverfront park today, with a monument, a gazebo, and a giant painted sneaker standing where the red ball was made. What follows is the whole arc at the size the record carries.