Housing the workforce: the company that did not build

THE NEGATIVE, AT TRUE SIZE

Mishawaka's industrial system has one absence so complete it amounts to a policy: No company-built housing for either of the great works stands in this record — no Ball Band cottages, no Dodge subdivision, no company-town plat of the kind the age made famous elsewhere in Indiana — and the finding is the Neighborhoods section's, printed there whole: what the record carries instead is the pattern of a walking city, the works' thousands housed in the grid around them, Ball Band's people in the West End and the south-side streets, Dodge's in the south-side grid its Union Street plant anchors. The contrast is the fact. In the same decades when Indiana's map acquired planned company communities, Mishawaka's employers bought no land for houses, ran no housing department, and collected no rent: the workforce housed itself, in immigrant enclaves built lot by lot — the Belgian West End bounded by Fourth, Thirteenth, Spring and Logan Streets, the Italian enclaves on the two banks — in a private market the factories' wages fed but their owners did not administer. The one great exception proves the rule by its builder. When Mishawaka finally did build workers' housing as a project, the builder was not a company but the labor system itself, joined with the veterans: Mishawaka Vets' Homes, Inc., formed in 1946 by United Rubber Workers Local 65, American Legion Post 161 and VFW Post 360, which raised the Normain Heights subdivision — 315 houses built 1947–49 on eighty acres of farmland annexed for the purpose, in a city so short of housing it had appointed a housing coordinator in January 1946; today a National Register historic district. The development's whole record belongs to the Veterans and Neighborhoods sections. Its place in this section is as the system's own answer to the question the companies never asked: when the housing had to be built, the union and the posts built it. The earlier record's silence should be stated at its true strength: no company-housing program by any Mishawaka employer appears in any source reached for this build — the city histories, the company histories, the directories, the National Register record — and the settling sources for the silence, should a later pass test it harder, are the Sanborn fire-insurance maps' housing stock along the race and the works, and the city directories' street-by-street listings of the factory decades. Until those are dug for this question, the negative stands as this build's files leave it: the largest employers in the city's history housed no one, and the neighborhood that housed their veterans was built by the veterans' own organizations.

Sources:

1. This build's Neighborhoods section — the company-housing negative printed whole ("no Ball Band cottages, no Dodge subdivision, no company town plat"), and the walking-city pattern of the West End and south-side grids.
2. National Park Service, National Register nomination, Normain Heights historic district — Mishawaka Vets' Homes, Inc. formed by URWA Local 65, American Legion Post 161 and VFW Post 360; housing coordinator J. A. Riggs appointed January 1946; the development's course, as the Veterans and Neighborhoods sections carry it.
3. This build's Population section — the Normain Heights ground in the annexation and township-balance record; cross-referenced.