Palmer C. and Pardon J. Perkins — the windmill brothers

the patent 10 August 1869 · the joint-stock company 14 July 1873 · receivership 1917

The founding act: Palmer C. Perkins was a New Yorker who had learned blacksmithing and ax making, and in Mishawaka he bought the idle Bement axe factory and its remaining assets. On 10 August 1869 he was awarded patent No. 93,472 for an "Improvement in Windmills" — the solid wooden-wheel mill that carried his name — and he turned the axe works over to his nephew Newman Perkins and built the windmill business on the patent. His twin brother Pardon Joshua Perkins moved to Mishawaka in 1871 as the company expanded, and on 14 July 1873 the brothers and four other partners formed a joint-stock company with capital of $4,000, fusing the axe and windmill businesses as the Perkins Wind Mill and Ax Company — a founding by patent, purchase, and family partnership in one instrument.

The run, and the hired chief: The sales line in the trade history runs from 1,500 windmills in 1883 to 5,000 a year in 1899, a figure the magazine pairs with its own judgment that Perkins had become the world's largest manufacturer of windmills — the superlative is the magazine's and is printed as its claim. In September 1915 the company took the name Perkins Wind Mill & Engine Company. Its last president of the Mishawaka years was not a Perkins: Manuel M. Fisher, who had worked his way up in the company from its founding era, became its president and led the turn into gas engines and farm equipment before the fall, on the trade history's account. The company went into receivership in 1917 — its receiver was William Holland of the Sibley Machine Company of South Bend — and the remnant left Mishawaka, the removal carried two ways (to South Bend in 1920 as the Perkins Corporation, on the engine-trade history; the complete move in 1925, on the local account) with production ending about 1925 in both tellings. Fisher's presidency is printed at the trade history's strength: no dates for his taking or leaving the office were reached, and none are supplied.

The founder as the city's capitalist: The Perkins brothers' second record is where they put the windmill money: the axe-history record notes the brothers invested in other companies, "including banks and a furniture business" — and Palmer Perkins's $2,000 matching gift of 1882 founded the St. Joseph County Orphans Home, the city's largest nineteenth-century charity, in the founding told in the Women Founders entry below. The windmill founder as the orphanage's capital is the founder-to-institution pattern in its earliest Mishawaka form: a manufacturer's conditional gift, matched by the town.

Sources:

1. Businesses & Banks — "Perkins Wind Mill" (the Bement purchase; patent No. 93,472 of 10 August 1869; Newman Perkins and the axe works; Pardon Perkins's arrival in 1871; the joint-stock company of 14 July 1873 at $4,000; the sales series and the magazine's superlative, attributed; the September 1915 renaming; Manuel M. Fisher's rise to the presidency; the 1917 receivership under William Holland; the removal carried 1920 vs 1925; production ending about 1925; the brothers' investments in banks and a furniture business).
2. Charities — "The temperance women and the windmill money" (Palmer C. Perkins's $2,000 donation of 1882, conditioned on the town's matching it).