The works at full size

1903 – 1937

The employment ladder, every rung dated: The plant's growth is best read in its dated employment pegs, each printed with its carrier: twenty-five persons at the incorporated company's start (company history); 140 to 150 about 1893, with $200,000 of annual business (Goodspeed's Memoirs); nearly 2,000 in 1903 (the Beiger Mansion account); 5,000 by 1923 (the same account); and about 5,000 employees in 1937, making about twelve different products across about forty-three acres of floor space (Bock's 1937 history — "From a small woolen mill employing about 25 persons and established in 1838, the Mishawaka Rubber and Woolen Manufacturing company has grown to a gigantic plant employing 5,000 and manufacturing about 12 different products in 1937. The history of the plant is the history of Mishawaka."). The site itself — the ground the plant stood on in the center of the city — is given as forty-three acres in the state redevelopment record, the same figure as Bock's floor-space acreage by coincidence of the carriers; both statements stand as printed.

The buildings: The works grew by addition around the dam — the company's history counts four additions since 1867 by the 1890s — and the rubber era built in earnest. The great warehouse is the documented monument of the building years, and its dating carries a one-year conflict printed whole: Bock gives a warehouse of five stories built in 1922 at a cost of $500,000, covering five acres of floor space; the library's summary gives a five-story warehouse designed by Albert Kahn erected in 1921. The building, the architect, the five stories, and the five acres agree; the year stands at 1921 in one carrier and 1922 in the other. By the end, the state record counts fifty-eight buildings on the forty-three acres — the census of the works at its fullest, taken at the moment of its demolition.

The process: The plant's technical signature, on the marker that stands on its ground, was a vacuum-pressure method of vulcanization that the marker credits with revolutionizing the curing of rubber footwear — the works' own contribution to its industry's method, developed inside the fence and printed here as the marker states it. Inside that fence the company ran a town within the town in the plain operational sense: its own laboratories (whose work a hired-out-of-high-school testing technician describes first-hand in the war entry below), its own film unit (whose seventeen surviving films are catalogued in the traces entry), and a sales machine that by 1933 fielded over two hundred sales representatives selling to over sixty thousand retailers worldwide, on the abstract of the company's records at the IU South Bend Archives. The Foreman's Club picnics of 1935, 1936–37, and 1938–39 survive on the plant's own film — the works documenting its own sociability, which is also a form of record.

Sources:

1. Milton Bock, South Bend Tribune, 1937 — the 5,000 employees, twelve products, and about forty-three acres of floor space in 1937; the five-story warehouse built in 1922 at $500,000 covering five acres of floor space; and four additions since 1867.
2. Mishawaka-Penn Public Library summary (after Goldstein, 1980) — the five-story Albert Kahn warehouse erected in 1921, printed against Bock's 1922.
3. Goodspeed's Memoirs (1893) and the Beiger Mansion account — employment of 140–150 about 1893, nearly 2,000 in 1903, and 5,000 by 1923.
4. IU South Bend Archives, finding-aid abstract of the company's records — over 200 sales representatives and over 60,000 retailers worldwide in 1933; and the Mishawaka Woolen and Rubber Company Film Collection — the Foreman's Club picnic films of 1935, 1936–37, and 1938–39.
5. Indiana Brownfields Bulletin (Indiana Finance Authority), 1999 — the fifty-eight buildings and the forty-three-acre site.
6. Ball-Band Factory marker — the vacuum-pressure method of vulcanization.