The long narrowing: a half-century of removals, one line at a time

1917–2009

Mishawaka's deindustrialization has no date, because it was not an event: It was a sequence, spread over ninety years, in which the lines were removed one at a time — and the sequence, aligned, is this section's last historical entry. It began before the word existed: the Perkins Wind Mill & Engine Company went into receivership in 1917 and its remnant left for South Bend by 1925, killed, on the trade history's plain statement, by the decline of windmill and engine sales "as rural electrification reached the farms the windmills had served" — a works undone by the very power transition this record celebrates, its market electrified out from under it. The Kamm & Schellinger brewery, which had survived Prohibition on root beer and cereal beverages, brewed its last in 1951 — 1952 in the Tribune's retrospective dating, printed both ways in the Businesses section. The middle removals were the subsidiaries'. Wheelabrator, whose Mishawaka plant the Auburn case study counts at 1,500 employees in the 1970s, was wound down in pieces: shot-making to Bedford, Virginia, in 1983; the foundry to Walterboro, South Carolina, in 1984; and in the mid-1980s the decision to close the Indiana plant — "old, and too large for its volume of business," in the case study's summary — the equipment business consolidating at LaGrange, Georgia, in 1991. Ball Band's narrowing ran in two blows twenty-nine years apart, and the Ball Band section's correction of the popular telling belongs to this entry too: what Uniroyal announced on 22 March 1968 was the transfer of the footwear divisions — the original business, forty-two per cent of the workforce — to Naugatuck and Woonsocket; the plant that remained worked twenty-eight more years on fuel cells, extrusions, adhesives and coated fabrics while its lines were progressively sold off under Uniroyal Plastics after 1985, and closed for good only in 1997. Dodge's leaving was the slowest of all: the brand's production geography marched south on the company's own timeline — Rogersville, Tennessee, 1971; Greenville, South Carolina, 1977; Asheville, 1979; Belton, 1995; Marion, 1996; Shanghai, 2000 — while the Union Street foundry passed to RMG, closed about 1999, reopened, and closed again in July 2006 with an estimated 180 workers, the 1878 works' last dated rung. The H2's suspension in January 2009, with about 200 workers laid off — one contemporary account says 250 — closed the sequence's civilian chapter. The pattern across the ninety years is consistent enough to state: with the partial exception of the brewery and the windmill works, Mishawaka's great works were not killed by their markets in the years they left. They were subsidiaries, and they were narrowed, transferred and sold down by parents in New York, Detroit and points beyond, in decisions whose dates this record prints and whose reasoning stands in the parents' records, not the city's. And the demographic consequence is the valley's anomaly: the city whose industry narrowed for half a century never recorded a population decline after 1940 — the Population section's staircase, six consecutive growing censuses from 1960 on annexation and infill, while the valley's larger city shrank in five of seven. The narrowing cost Mishawaka its names, its skyline of works, and thousands of jobs rung by rung. It did not cost the city its people, because the people, by then, worked everywhere the metro worked, and the ground the works vacated lay inside a city still willing to annex, remediate and rebuild. The implosion that stands as the narrowing's public image — five buildings of the Ball Band works dropped by 5,000 sticks of dynamite on 17 June 2000 before an estimated six thousand watchers, no building kept — came three years after the closing it is remembered for, and is carried whole in the Ball Band section; here it stands as the sequence's punctuation, not its substance.

Sources:

1. Gas Engine Magazine and the axe-history record, as carried in this build's Businesses section — the Perkins receivership of 1917, the removal to South Bend (1920 in the trade history, 1925 complete in the local account), production ending about 1925, and the rural-electrification cause as the trade history states it.
2. M. V. Uzumeri and J. T. Black, "Wheelabrator: A Case Study of Variation in Manufacturing Management" (Auburn University, January 1995) — the 1970s plant at 1,500 employees; the 1983 and 1984 relocations; the mid-1980s closing decision and its summary reasoning; the LaGrange consolidation of 1991.
3. Chrapliwy v. Uniroyal, Inc., 458 F. Supp. 252 (N.D. Ind. 1977), and the Ball-Band Factory marker — the 22 March 1968 footwear announcement and two-year phase-out; the post-1985 sell-down under Uniroyal Plastics; the closing of 1997.
4. Dodge Industrial (RBC Bearings), the company's institutional history page, read November 2026 — the plant openings at Rogersville (1971), Greenville (1977), Asheville (1979), Belton (1995), Marion (1996) and Shanghai (2000); and Foundry Management & Technology (2 July 2006) — the RMG closing with an estimated 180 workers.
5. Contemporary trade press, January 2009, as carried in the AM General section — about 200 workers laid off at the H2 suspension, one account says 250.
6. This build's Population section — the post-1940 record: one decline in the whole series (1940), then six consecutive growing censuses 1960–2020; cross-referenced.