The custom trades at the directory's count, 1921

Polk's Mishawaka City Directory 1921 · sampled year, never extrapolated

The book. The 1921 Polk directory for Mishawaka — its own volume, bound inside the South Bend book — closes with a classified list of the city's trades. Read for dress, it counts the clothing business whole, and its geography is the finding: a downtown of clothiers on Main Street and Lincoln Way, and a second cloth trade in the Belgian West End, where the dry-goods houses stood on the same blocks as the families they served.

Clothing: nine. Under the heading Clothing, the classified names nine houses: Alexander's, 111 Lincoln Way W.; Benjamin Baer, 109 S. Main; Henry Huys, 701 W. 6th; Henry Marks, 503 N. Main; Mishawaka Clothiers, 107 N. Main; Maurice Nevel, 311–15 N. Main; Samuel Patland, 508 N. Main; Abraham I. Piser, 225 Smith; and the Fred A. Ullman Co., 115–17 S. Main. Under Ladies' Ready to Wear, two: M. Gilbert & Son, 113 Lincoln Way W., and Gross & Gross, 116 Lincoln Way E.

Dressmakers: four, all women, all at home. The dressmaking trade of 1921 worked from residential addresses: Florence S. Klaer, 1338 Lincoln Way E.; Lizzie B. Kronewitter, 225 S. West; Edith Shadowsky, 208 Union; and Mrs. Elizabeth Shaffer, 206 Milburn Blvd. No dressmaking shop stands in the classified; the trade is four women, named, at the houses where the work was done.

Milliners: four. Mrs. Harry Hopkins, 215 S. Main; L. D. Lotts, 124 Lincoln Way E.; Renwick & Co., 607 N. Main — the Mishawaka store of the South Bend millinery house whose own record stands in South Bend's file — and Mrs. V. C. Vogt, 121 Lincoln Way W., the address the same directory gives F. A. Vogt, jeweler.

Dry goods: eleven, and the West End cluster. The Dry Goods—Retail heading names eleven houses, and five of them stand within a few blocks of each other in the Belgian quarter: August Buysse, 601 W. 6th; Henry Huys, 701 W. 6th — the same Huys the Clothing heading carries, a West End house under both — Theophile DeMeester, 423 W. 7th; Leonard Tackels, 540 W. 7th; and Henrie Van Volsen, 422 W. 7th. The downtown dry-goods houses complete the eleven: Simon Cohen & Co., 609 N. Main; Gilbert M. & Son again, 113 Lincoln Way W.; Abraham L. Piser, 225 Smith; Stein Bros., 109 W. Mishawaka Ave.; J. W. Stein & Son, 517 N. Main; and A. S. Winey, 123 Lincoln Way W. The care of clothes appears too, at two entries under Cleaners and Dyers: the De Cocker Dry Cleaning Co., 121 S. Main, and Arthur Huys, 508 Wells.

The one manufacturing heading. The classified's only heading that touches dress as manufacture is Rubber Footwear Manufacturers, and it has one entry: the Mishawaka Woolen Manufacturing Co., 318 N. Hill. The works that employed the town enters its own city's fashion record under footwear. Around it, the alphabetical list carries the trade's hands rather than its shops: the titles shoemaker and bootmaker recur through the volume on line after line — the works' own job names, listed man by man — while the custom tailors stand singly, among them Benona Loppens, a tailor in the basement of 101 N. Main, and a tailor's bench at 105½ Lincoln Way W. The classified's final leaves, where a tailors' heading would have stood, do not survive in the copy of the edition reached; the tailors are recoverable only as the alphabetical list names them.

Sources:

1. Polk's South Bend and Mishawaka City Directory 1921 (archive.org, polksouthbendind00polk) — the Mishawaka classified (Clothing; Ladies' Ready to Wear; Dressmakers; Milliners; Dry Goods—Retail; Cleaners and Dyers; Notions; Rubber Footwear Manufacturers) and the Mishawaka alphabetical section, read whole.
2. The South Bend fashion record in this history (the Renwick house's own course, 1894–1921 and after).