Wheelabrator — the foundry-equipment works

The company from 1908; Mishawaka 1926 – the mid-1980s

Minich and the sandcutter: The company began with one salesman. Verne E. Minich founded the enterprise in 1908 — as the Sand Mixing Machine Company, in the company's own 1976 magazine — leasing and then selling a newly developed mechanical sand-cutting device to foundries. In 1919 Minich merged his company with the Rich Foundry Equipment Company of Chicago, bringing in core machines and dust collectors; in 1920 the company took the name American Foundry Equipment Company. (The International Directory of Company Histories dates the American Foundry Equipment Company's establishment to 1911; the company's own histories date Minich's enterprise to 1908. Both are printed; the 1908 date is the founder's own record.) The young company's manufacturing moved from Cleveland to Chicago, and then, on 1 January 1926, was consolidated in one place: an eighty-three-acre site in Mishawaka. The workforce that arrived numbered less than a hundred, office, engineering, and production together, on the company's magazine; the assembly floor was photographed in January 1927, already at work.

The machine that named the company: In 1933, in the company historian Tony Harris's 1964 account, the company introduced the first practical airless blast-cleaning machine — a wheel that threw shot or grit against metal castings by centrifugal force, cleaning in seconds what sandblasting did in minutes — and called it the Wheelabrator. The International Directory dates the name's origin in Mishawaka to 1932 and has the firm itself renamed The Wheelabrator Corporation that year; the company's own magazine gives the name changes as 1946, to American Wheelabrator and Equipment Company, and 1955, shortened to Wheelabrator. The product date and the name's Mishawaka origin agree across the carriers; the corporate renaming sequence is printed as each gives it. Minich remained president until 1941, when Otto A. Pfaff — the office boy of 1916, general manager in 1933 — succeeded him. By 1964, in Harris's account, Mishawaka was still the company's principal manufacturing facility and its world headquarters; by the company's fiftieth year on the site, 1976, the plant occupied more than 750,000 square feet (the Auburn University case study of the company counts 600,000 square feet and 1,500 employees for the 1970s; both size figures stand at their carriers). The case study dates the Mishawaka move itself to 1936, against the company's own 1926, documented by its 1976 fiftieth-anniversary observance and the January 1927 assembly-floor photograph; the company's date governs here, and the study's later figures are used at their own strength.

The environmental turn, and the leaving: The dust the Wheelabrator captured became a second business: in anticipation of clean-air legislation, the company licensed electrostatic precipitator technology from the German firm Lurgi and built the Wheelabrator Clean Air Company at Pittsburgh, and in the 1970s it built its first waste-fueled energy plant, at Saugus, Massachusetts — the line that became Wheelabrator Technologies, the waste-to-energy company (today WIN Waste Innovations), in the International Directory's history. The Mishawaka equipment works, meanwhile, was wound down in pieces: shot-making moved to Bedford, Virginia, in 1983; the foundry was relocated to Walterboro, South Carolina, in 1984; and in the mid-1980s, the Auburn study records, the company decided to close the Indiana plant — old, and too large for its volume of business — and move the equipment business to Georgia, where its plants were consolidated at LaGrange in 1991. Wheelabrator-Frye Inc., formed in 1971, was the corporate vehicle of those years. What became of the eighty-three Mishawaka acres after the equipment business left is not established in the record reached; the county property records and the South Bend Tribune archive are the settling sources, and the gap is named rather than filled.

Sources:

1. Tony Harris, "Wheelabrator History" (the company's history, 1 June 1964, as preserved in the shot-peening trade library) — Minich's 1908 start leasing and selling the sand-cutting device; the 1919 Rich Foundry Equipment merger; the 1920 American Foundry Equipment name; the consolidation of manufacturing at the eighty-three-acre Mishawaka site on 1 January 1926; the first practical airless blast machine introduced in 1933; Mishawaka in 1964 still the principal plant and world headquarters.
2. The Wheelabrator Way, the company's magazine (Vol. 1 No. 1, July 1976) — the fiftieth anniversary of the Mishawaka location in 1976; the early-1926 workforce of less than one hundred; plant facilities over 750,000 square feet; Minich's founding of the Sand Mixing Machine Co. in 1908 and presidency to 1941; Pfaff's succession; the 1946 and 1955 name changes; the 1912 Sandcutter; Wheelabrator-Frye's formation in 1971.
3. M. V. Uzumeri and J. T. Black, "Wheelabrator: A Case Study of Variation in Manufacturing Management" (Auburn University, January 1995) — the 1970s plant at 1,500 employees and 600,000 square feet; the 1983 shot-plant move to Bedford, Virginia; the 1984 foundry relocation to Walterboro, South Carolina; the mid-1980s decision to close the Indiana plant and move the equipment business to Georgia, consolidated at LaGrange in 1991; and the study's 1936 date for the Mishawaka move, printed here as the conflict it is.
4. International Directory of Company Histories, "Wheelabrator Technologies, Inc." — the American Foundry Equipment establishment dated 1911; the Wheelabrator name originating in Mishawaka in 1932 and the firm's renaming that year; the Lurgi license and the Pittsburgh Clean Air company; the first waste-fueled plant at Saugus; and the line's descent to the modern waste-to-energy company.