Flour first: the eastern market of the mill town

1835 – 1880s

The first thing Mishawaka shipped out was flour: The town's first flouring mill rose in 1835, two years after the plat, and by 1858 flour was the largest single manufacture in the town's economy — $125,000 of the $407,000 total value of Mishawaka manufactures that year, ahead of wagons and carriages at $120,000, on the figures the Mishawaka Enterprise and the St. Joseph Valley Register printed in March 1859 and Ward Baker's study of the village preserves. The mills are the Businesses section's as manufactories and their wheat demand is the Farms & Crops section's; what belongs here is the direction the flour traveled, and the county history states it in the trade's own terms. Of the Mishawaka Mills Chapman wrote in 1880 that their flour stood "at the head of the market, both in the East and West"; of the Ripple Mills, that they had "a large trade in the East." Three mills with a combined stated capacity of some 600 barrels a day in 1880 did not sell at the town's own counter: they sold into the eastern market the railroads had opened, and the county history's phrasing — the head of the market, East and West — is the period record's own statement of a Mishawaka product competing at national distance. The wagon and carriage trade beside the flour, $120,000 of it in 1858, stands at the same strength: a product made for distant buyers, its destinations unrecorded in the sources reached.

Sources:

1. This build's Farms & Crops section — the 1858 manufactures figures (Mishawaka Enterprise, 5 March 1859, and St. Joseph Valley Register, 17 March 1859, as compiled in Ward Baker's study): flour $125,000 of $407,000; wagons and carriages $120,000; and Chapman's 1880 mill accounts (the Mishawaka Mills' flour "at the head of the market, both in the East and West"; the Ripple Mills' "large trade in the East"; the three mills' combined capacity of some 600 barrels a day).