The Beigers and the woolen company

1867 – 1886

The purchase: In 1867 Jacob Beiger and his son Martin V. Beiger bought the woolen mill. The company's history and every later carrier agree on the year and the buyers; the price and the seller's name are not carried in the record reached. Jacob Beiger was a German immigrant who had come to America in 1844, in the biography of his son published in Goodspeed's Pictorial and Biographical Memoirs of Elkhart and St. Joseph Counties (1893); Martin, born in St. Joseph County on 3 February 1847, had served as a private in Company H of the 138th Indiana Volunteer Infantry in 1864 and come home to the wool trade. On his return, the same biography states, he became at twenty-one a member of the firm of M. V. Beiger & Co., engaged in the manufacture of woolen cloth — the family's own firm name inside the mill's first Beiger years.

The incorporation: On 31 January 1874 the business was incorporated as the Mishawaka Woolen Manufacturing Company, with a capital of twenty-five thousand dollars. Timothy Edward Howard's A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907) names the incorporators: George Hartstein, Jacob Beiger, Martin V. Beiger, D. A. Dixon, and George E. Wells. Howard's judgment on what followed is the county history's own: the company "has become noted for its success in the manufacture of wool boots; the extent of the manufacture and sale of such wool felt boots having long since attained mammoth proportions." The company's published history gives the starting workforce as twenty-five persons, making flannels and yarn; the Beiger Mansion's account of the founders states that the Beigers began with "just 3 employees." Both statements stand in the carriers that carry them, and both are printed here — the company's figure for the incorporated works, the mansion account's for the family's start — without averaging.

The mill-town footprint at woolen size: At woolen-mill size the company's civic footprint was a family's, not yet an institution's: a works at the dam in the center of town, a workforce in the dozens drawn from the surrounding streets, and proprietors who lived in the town their mill anchored. That changed in kind after 1886, when the product changed. The Eberhart family enters the record with the boot; Adolphus Eberhart, whose biography in Goodspeed's 1893 Memoirs is the fullest first-hand account of the reorganization, was by then one of the county's established mill men — a wagon- and carriage-maker turned flouring-mill builder — and his course is carried whole in the closing entry of this fragment.

Sources:

1. Timothy Edward Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907) — the incorporation of 31 January 1874, the capital of $25,000, the five incorporators, and the county history's judgment on the wool-boot trade.
2. Goodspeed Brothers, Pictorial and Biographical Memoirs of Elkhart and St. Joseph Counties, Indiana (1893), biography of M. V. Beiger — Jacob Beiger a native German who came to America in 1844; Martin born 3 February 1847; his 1864 service in Company H, 138th Indiana; and the firm of M. V. Beiger & Co.
3. The History of Ball Band (company history, via Michiana Memory) — the 1867 purchase by Jacob and Martin V. Beiger and the incorporated company of 1874.
4. Beiger Mansion, published account of the founders — the Beigers' start with "just 3 employees," printed against the company history's twenty-five.