Peppermint oil: half of Indiana's crop bound for England and Germany

1906

The documented export, in pounds: The Farms & Crops section owns the crop — the drained La Salle swamp, the Woodward brothers' 320 acres, the stills — and carries the Indianapolis News report of 13 October 1906 at length. What this section owns is where the oil went, and the same report states it with a tradesman's precision. The world's supply of high-grade peppermint oil, the News reported, came from the northern Indiana counties, southern Michigan and Wayne County, New York; the low-grade supply came from Japan. Indiana's 1906 crop, just distilled when the report appeared, was a little more than 50,000 pounds of the 250,000 pounds of national production — and "about half of it bound for export to England and Germany." That is the hardest export sentence in Mishawaka's whole record: a named commodity, a named share, two named destination countries, in a dated newspaper account of a harvest then in progress. The Mishawaka district's place inside it is the report's own: the district covered "practically all of the mint fields in St. Joseph county," its fields ran to "almost one thousand acres," and its largest growers, the Woodwards of Mishawaka, were "the largest growers in Indiana and the second largest in this country" — behind only A. M. Todd of Kalamazoo, whose refining and dealing house at Kalamazoo was the trade's market center, the place the district's crude oil went to be redistilled, graded and sold on. The trade's geography, as the 1906 record draws it, is a three-step line: muck fields around Mishawaka, stills at the field edge, and the oil out — to the Kalamazoo refiners and the New York dealers, and from them to the confectioners, chewing-gum makers and pharmacists of England and Germany, the two countries the report names. The buyers at the far end are named by their trades, not their firms, in the record reached; the gum and confectionery houses that bought American mint oil in quantity in those years are documented in the trade's scholarly history at the industry level, and no firm is tied to Mishawaka-district oil by any source reached here.

The combine, as a trade fact: The occasion of the 1906 report was itself an export-trade event: the growers and distillers of northern Indiana, southern Michigan and Wayne County, New York, were entering a combination under James A. Everitt's American Society of Equity to hold their oil for about $2.75 a pound — an attempt by the producing districts, Mishawaka's among them, to set the price the export market would pay, made under the attorney-general's eye. The combination's fate is not in the record reached; its existence is, and it fixes the district's growers in 1906 as sellers who knew their market was the world's.

Sources:

1. Indianapolis News, 13 October 1906, as printed in Timothy E. Howard, History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), and carried whole in this build's Farms & Crops section — Indiana's 1906 crop a little over 50,000 pounds of 250,000 national; about half bound for export to England and Germany; the high-grade world's supply from northern Indiana, southern Michigan and Wayne County, New York, the low-grade from Japan; the Mishawaka district's near-thousand acres and practically all of St. Joseph County's mint fields; the Woodwards the largest growers in Indiana and second largest in the country, behind A. M. Todd of Kalamazoo; the Everitt combination to hold oil at about $2.75 a pound.
2. Dan Allosso, Peppermint Kings: A Rural American History (Yale University Press, 2020) — the trade's scholarly frame: Todd's Kalamazoo house as the industry's refining and dealing center from the 1870s, buying and redistilling the Michigan and Indiana districts' crude oil; the export trade to Great Britain and Europe as the industry's founding market.