The river mill before the Beigers

About 1838 – 1874

The mill at the dam: The company's own published history, The History of Ball Band, opens the record: "According to reports, it was in about 1838 that a woolen mill was first established in Mishawaka." The mill stood by the dam on the St. Joseph River, in the cluster of water-powered industry that was the town's reason for existing — the dam itself is dated 1835 in the local record, and the iron works beside it held the first blast furnace west of Detroit and Toledo. The wooden mill was small: the company's history gives the early works twenty-five employees, making flannels and yarn. The Mishawaka-Penn Public Library's local-history summary, drawn from Deborah May Goldstein's Made in South Bend/Mishawaka (1980), fixes the physical facts the later plant inherited: a small wooden mill built in 1838 near the dam, taken in 1897 with stakes driven for the rubber plant that would rise beside it.

The Civil War color, at the strength it carries: The mill's one appearance in the war record is a sentence in a South Bend Tribune "Voice of the People" retrospective of 2000, written as the plant was coming down: the Mishawaka Woolen Mill, "established in 1838, and bought by Jacob Beiger in 1867, after it supplied the Union Army with blankets." No contract, order, or quantity is named in the record reached, and the statement stands here as that retrospective gives it — attributed civic memory of a real trade the valley's mills all shared in, not a documented contract. The name of the mill's first builder and the terms of its early ownership do not survive in the carriers reached; the county deed records and the full text of the city's published history are the settling sources named for both.

What the Beigers bought: What changed hands in 1867 was therefore a going concern of about thirty years' standing — a water-powered woolen mill with a dam, a race, a workforce measured in dozens, and a product line of flannels, yarn, blankets, and felt boots. Milton Bock's history of the company, published in the South Bend Tribune in 1937, states the early line plainly: "Between '67 and '86, blankets and felt boots were its only products." The ground, the water power, and the town's labor were the purchase; the fortune was made afterward, out of wool.

Sources:

1. The History of Ball Band, the company's own published history, as digitized in Michiana Memory (St. Joseph County Public Library) — the woolen mill established "in about 1838," the purchase of 1867, the twenty-five employees and the flannel and yarn line.
2. Mishawaka-Penn Public Library, local-history summary of the Ball Band plant, drawn from Deborah May Goldstein, Made in South Bend/Mishawaka (Discovery Hall Museum, 1980) — the small wooden mill of 1838 near the dam and the plant's address at 312 N. Hill Street.
3. Milton Bock, "Ball Band History Parallels Story of Mishawaka Growth," South Bend Tribune, 1937 — the mill established four years after the town's founding, about twenty-five persons employed, and blankets and felt boots as the only products from 1867 to 1886.
4. Peg Carney Luecke, "Voice of the People," South Bend Tribune, 2000 — the dam of 1835, the first blast furnace west of Detroit and Toledo, and the mill's supply of blankets to the Union Army, as the retrospective states it.