The census that named the trade in one sentence: manufactures, 1909

Thirteenth Census, Vol. IX · the Indiana chapter, read first-hand

The structural fact. The 1909 Census of Manufactures printed industry-by-industry detail only for cities of 50,000 or more. Mishawaka — 11,886 people in 1910, up from 5,560 in 1900, one of five Indiana cities that crossed 10,000 in the decade — was too small for the detail tables. In the chapter's Table III the city appears once, on the pages for cities of 10,000 to 50,000, as a single all-industries row, and nowhere else in the volume is its clothing trade separated from its totals. South Bend, over the line, received industry detail and footnotes; Mishawaka received neither. The figures below are the whole of what the federal record says about the city's making in 1909, and they are all-industries figures — they must not be re-quoted as garment figures.

The row. Forty-two establishments. Persons engaged, 3,934: twenty-two proprietors, sixty-one salaried officers and managers, and clerks numbering 359 men and 47 women. Wage earners averaged 3,445 across the year — 2,901 men and 458 women of sixteen and over, and 86 children under sixteen — and on December 15, the census's snapshot day, 3,501 wage earners were at work, 88 of them under sixteen. Capital stood at $14,223,645; the value of products at $10,882,846; value added by manufacture, $5,612,884; primary horsepower, 7,610. Read against the other eighteen cities of its class on the same pages, Mishawaka stood second in capital, behind only Hammond, and third in products, behind Hammond and Anderson — a manufacturing weight out of proportion to its 11,886 people, and the table cannot say how much of it was cloth.

The one sentence. What the chapter's narrative does say, it says in a single sentence, and it is the census's only industry-level statement about the city: "There was only one establishment manufacturing rubber boots and shoes in Indiana in 1909. This establishment was located at Mishawaka and was the city's most important branch of manufacture." The establishment is the Mishawaka Woolen Manufacturing Company — the Ball Band works — and the sentence is the federal government's whole account of the trade this section exists to record: the town's most important manufacture was a thing worn on the feet.

Sources:

1. Thirteenth Census of the United States, Vol. IX, Manufactures 1909, Indiana chapter — narrative p. 312 (the rubber boots and shoes sentence); Table III, cities of 10,000–50,000, pp. 336–337 (the Mishawaka row, read digit-by-digit from the printed page; the row's alignment is confirmed by the chapter's own check — the five cities newly over 10,000 sum in the table to the $23,662,684 the narrative gives for them together, p. 311).
2. The Ball Band section of this history (the works' own record: the woolen mill, the knit boot, the rubber line).