What Mishawaka Sold to the World: A History of Its Exports

Exports · What Mishawaka shipped to the world

Mishawaka has no port, no customs house and no export ledger of its own, and for a century and a half its goods went everywhere anyway. They went the way manufactured goods from an inland mill town go: by rail to other people's ports, under other companies' sales organizations, and — in the one case where the record is complete — under a sales machine the town built itself and then watched a national parent absorb. The outward record that survives is therefore uneven, and this section prints it at its uneven strength. At one end stands a farm crop whose export share was reported in pounds and destinations by a state newspaper in 1906. At the other stands a blast-cleaning machine whose maker kept its own export history — percentages, licensees, plant sites, dates — and printed it in 1964. Between them stand a windmill that watered the Plains by the thousand, a pulley its maker advertised as installed throughout the world, a rubber boot sold through sixty thousand retailers, fuel tanks that flew to Tokyo in the bomb bays of other men's airplanes, and a military truck whose foreign orders are announced by the Department of Defense to this day. What no source reached gives Mishawaka is a total: no company export ledger for any Mishawaka house is public, and the modern federal count is a metropolitan count, printed below as the metro's and no more. The destinations are the record; the sums mostly are not, and this section does not invent them.