The count of the transformation: a ladder, not a series

1874–2025

No continuous employment series for Mishawaka industry exists in the record reached; what exists is rungs, and the rungs are eloquent — and the census’s own city rows, pulled after this article was written, now stand in this section in the census addendum folded beside it: The Businesses section closes its file with a ladder of dated employment figures, each printed with its year and carrier, and this section gathers the ladder whole because the ladder, read as one artifact, is the transformation counted. The Ball Band works: twenty-five persons at the incorporated company's start in 1874 (the company history); 140 to 150 about 1893 (Goodspeed's memoirs); nearly 2,000 in 1903 (the Beiger Mansion account); 5,000 by 1923 (the same account) and about 5,000 in 1937 across about forty-three acres and a dozen products (Bock's 1937 history in the South Bend Tribune); the all-time peak of 9,446 in 1943 (the city history), which the marker on the ground rounds to "nearly 10,000 workers during WWII." The Dodge works: more than 1,200 persons in 1910, the city's largest employer (the Mix biography); and, in its RMG foundry afterlife, an estimated 180 workers at its second closing in July 2006 (the foundry trade press) — the 1878 works' first and last dated rungs, 1,200 and 180, ninety-six years apart. The Wheelabrator works: a total workforce of less than one hundred, office, engineering and production together, on its arrival in 1926 (the company's magazine); 1,500 employees in the 1970s (the Auburn University case study). The McKinley Highway works: about 430 jobs preserved at the commercial plant's sale in 2017, eighty-one remaining workers there by July 2019, and about 400 UAW Local 5 members across the Mishawaka complex in September 2025 (the union's own release), with the AM General section's dated figures between. Two wage points survive at bench level and stand for the pay record the ladder lacks: fifty cents an hour, the wage at which Bernard L. Rice was hired out of Mishawaka High School in 1940 as a testing technician in the Ball Band laboratories, in his own published recollection; and twelve and a half cents an hour, the raise whose delayed ruling by the War Labor Board the plant struck over in March 1943, in the wire record. What the ladder cannot do is what a series would: it cannot say what Mishawaka manufacturing employed in total in any year, nor trace any works year by year, and the holes are printed rather than bridged — Dodge's Second World War employment, Ball Band's peacetime levels decade by decade, and Wheelabrator's year-by-year course are named in the Businesses section as gaps, their settling sources the South Bend Tribune's business pages and the Indiana manufacturers' directories. The federal instrument that would fill the frame exists and is named: the Census of Manufactures' city tables — the comparative summary for cities of 10,000 inhabitants or more in the Fourteenth Census's manufactures volumes and its Abstract, which would give Mishawaka's establishments, wage-earners, wages, materials, products and primary horsepower for 1909, 1914 and 1919 from the printed page — was not pulled first-hand, and no figure from it is printed here. Until it is, the honest count of Mishawaka's transformation is this ladder: twenty-five hands making flannel in 1874, nine thousand four hundred forty-six making fuel cells and raincoats in 1943, and four hundred union members building military trucks in 2025 — three dated numbers, each with its carrier, spanning the whole arc.

Sources:

1. This build's Businesses section — the employers' ladder, dated rung by rung, with the two flagships' rungs cross-referenced to their own files and the gaps named; the ladder's carriers are Goodspeed's Memoirs (1893), the Beiger Mansion account, Milton Bock's 1937 history in the South Bend Tribune, the Coachbuilt Mix biography, The Wheelabrator Way (1976), the Auburn University case study (1995), Foundry Management & Technology (2 July 2006), and the company's and union's current releases, each as the Businesses and AM General sections cite them.
2. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History, as carried in the Ball Band section — the all-time employment peak of 9,446 in 1943; the Ball-Band Factory marker — "nearly 10,000 workers during WWII."
3. Bernard L. Rice, "Recollections of a World War II Combat Medic," Indiana Magazine of History, vol. XCIII (December 1997) — hired in 1940 at fifty cents an hour as a physical testing technician.
4. Eugene Register-Guard, 9 March 1943 (wire) — the twelve-and-a-half-cent demand and the War Labor Board delay, as the Ball Band section carries them.
5. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census, Vol. VIII, Manufactures 1919, and the Abstract of the Census of Manufactures, 1919, ch. 5 — the comparative city summary named as this count's settling source, not pulled first-hand.