Boots of three cloths: the felt works, the knit boot, and the missing shirt factory

1880–1909 · the garment manufacture at documented size

The second house. Before the knit boot, there was felt. Dempster Beatty — born in Sandusky City, Ohio, in 1828, and carried in the 1893 county memoirs as "the first man to organize a company for the manufacture of felt boots in Indiana" — came back to Mishawaka in 1876, and in 1880 began business with his son Leonard E. Beatty in the manufacture of felt boots. The memoir gives the young firm's measure: 400 cases in its first year, and the standing of third firm in the United States to engage in the business. In 1886 the house was organized as a stock company — the Beatty Felting Company — with capital of $50,000, of which $45,300 was paid in; Dempster Beatty was president, E. L. Beatty vice-president, and Lutheria Beatty secretary. "The capacity is now 20,000 cases per year," the memoir says of the works in 1893, "but they are exceeding this." The firm stands in the 1889 state directory of manufacturers in this history's Businesses roster. By the 1921 city directory the Beatty Felting Company is gone — no factory, no officers, only residents of the name — and the directory record reached does not date its end.

The knit boot. The flagship's cloth side stands whole in the Businesses section and is stated here at the garment size it earned. The woolen mill the Beiger brothers bought in 1867 made flannels and yarn first; incorporated in 1874, it turned in 1886 to the product that made the town's name in dress: the all-knit wool boot of Beiger and Eberhart, the first wool boot to hold its shape without shrinking or stretching. Flannel and carpet yarn were discontinued for it; lumbermen's long wool socks followed from 1889, and felt boots came onto the works' own list about that year — the company history's two columns give 1889 and 1895, and the conflict stands in the Businesses file where it belongs. Rubber followed, and by 1909 the works was the one establishment in Indiana making rubber boots and shoes. The town's garment industry, across its whole documented course, was footwear in three cloths — wool knit, wool felt, rubber — made in two houses, and the work at the works was, by the later record carried in this history's Women's History section, substantially women's work: nearly three-fifths of Ball Band's footwear hands were women.

The negative, printed whole. The shirt, overall, and underwear trades of the brief do not exist on this ground in the record reached. Neither sampled directory — 1921 nor 1956 — carries a Mishawaka garment factory of any kind beyond the footwear works, and no heading for shirt, overall, or underwear manufacture appears in either classified. South Bend's branch plants of that trade — the Wilson Brothers shirt factory and the H. D. Lee overall works — stood across the city line and stand in South Bend's file. What Mishawaka made to wear, it made for feet.

Sources:

1. Goodspeed Brothers, Pictorial and Biographical Memoirs of Elkhart and St. Joseph Counties (1893) — the Dempster Beatty biography, read first-hand (the first felt-boot company claim, the 1880 beginning, the 400 cases, the 1886 organization and its officers, the 20,000-case capacity).
2. The Businesses and Ball Band sections of this history (the woolen mill's course, the knit boot of 1886, the socks of 1889, the felt-boot dating conflict, the 1889 manufacturers' roster).
3. Polk's Mishawaka City Directory 1921 and Polk's South Bend–Mishawaka Directory 1956, classified sections — no garment manufacture beyond the footwear works in either sample.