Mishawaka's Industrial Revolution: Iron, Wool, Rubber, and the Truck Plant

The Industrial Revolution · Iron, Wool, Rubber, and the Truck Plant

Mishawaka's industry did not begin with a factory either. It began with a fall of water too small to look at — two feet and nine inches, as the county history measured it — and with a swamp that rusted. What the town made of those two facts is a system with three lives. The first ran on bog iron and water power: a blast furnace at the rapids in 1834, a dam across the river in 1837, races on both banks, and a decade in which the place stood, on the judgment its own history carries, as the largest center of heavy industry in the Great Lakes country west of Detroit. The ore gave out; the system did not. The second life ran on wool, then rubber, then power transmission — a woolen mill at the dam that learned to make the world's knit boot and then its rubber overshoe, and a pulley works on Union Street that sold every other factory in America the means of moving power from shaft to machine. The third life ran on military trucks: a converted components plant on McKinley Highway that has built every production Humvee since 1985. Between the lives stand the transformations this section is charged to tell — power changing state from water to steam to current, a workforce imported across an ocean and then counted, decade by decade, as it climbed from twenty-five hands to nine thousand and came back down, and a half-century ending in which the lines were removed one at a time, mostly by owners who lived somewhere else, while the city's population, alone among the valley's factory cities, never once fell after 1940. The firms themselves are profiled in the Businesses, Ball Band and AM General sections of this record. What is told here is what they added up to.

The Industrial Revolution leg closed its count with a confession: no continuous employment series for Mishawaka industry existed in the record reached, and the Census of Manufactures city tables — the one federal instrument that counted this city's factories whole, census after census, on one set of definitions — had not been pulled first-hand. This addendum pulls them. What follows is the city's row, year by year, as the Bureau of the Census printed it: establishments, hands, wages, materials, products and value added, in the Census of Manufactures and its predecessors from the Twelfth Census of 1900 to the last place table of the series in 1992. Every figure was read from the page image of its own table. Where the Bureau itself refused to print — and it refused, repeatedly, for this city — the refusal is printed instead, because the refusals turn out to be part of the evidence. The series is not smooth: the Bureau changed what it counted as the century turned (wage earners, then production workers, then all employees; value of products, then value of shipments), and each row below names its own measure rather than pretending to be one unbroken line. Read with that discipline, the federal count gives the transformation the frame the works-by-works ladder could not: how big the whole was, when it consolidated, when it peaked, and how it could shrink in hands for thirty years while quadrupling in dollars.