One ground, two industries: the woolen mill becomes a rubber works

1838–1923

The second life began in the first life's building: The works at the dam that the Beigers bought in 1867 was already about thirty years old — a small wooden woolen mill of about 1838, standing in the cluster of water-powered industry the dam had made, employing twenty-five persons on flannels and yarn, in the company's own published history. The system's first transformation happened inside that fence, and it was a change of material, not of address. In 1886 Martin V. Beiger and Adolphus Eberhart brought out the all-knit wool boot — the first wool boot that held its shape — and the works reorganized around it at $200,000 of capital, eight times the 1874 figure, employing 140 to 150 persons by about 1893 on $200,000 of annual business, as Goodspeed's 1893 memoirs record. In 1897 the company did the harder thing: it became a rubber company too, importing the process with the man — E. A. Saunders, superintendent of the Goodyear Metallic Rubber Company, resigned to erect and equip the rubber mill beside the woolen mill, and the first crude rubber was washed on Christmas Day 1897. From February 1898 the Mishawaka works was two factories in one fence, and the center of gravity moved steadily to the rubber side: boots and overshoes for a national branded market, where wool had sold regionally. The scale the transformation reached is carried in dated rungs the Ball Band section prints: nearly 2,000 employed by 1903; 5,000 by 1923, the year after the works became a subsidiary of the United States Rubber Company and a year before it took the name Mishawaka Rubber and Woolen Manufacturing Company; some forty-three acres at the center of the city; fifty-eight buildings by the end. The works' technical signature, on the marker that stands on its ground, was a vacuum-pressure method of vulcanization credited with revolutionizing the curing of rubber footwear — a process contribution developed inside the fence, printed as the marker states it. And inside the fence the company ran the apparatus of a system, not a shop: its own laboratories, its own film unit, and by 1933 a sales machine of over two hundred representatives selling to over sixty thousand retailers worldwide, on the abstract of the company's records at the IU South Bend Archives. Read as this section must read it, the Ball Band works is the proof that Mishawaka's industrial system was never its products. Wool, knit goods, rubber footwear, and — in the defense decades the Ball Band section carries — fuel cells, missile insulation and coated fabrics succeeded one another on the same forty-three acres, behind the same dam, drawn from the same labor pool, because what the site actually held was power, rail, a trained workforce and a company-town's worth of accumulated plant. When the products changed, the system bent. The firm's whole course — the boot, the red ball, the war work, the Chrapliwy case, the closing — is the Ball Band section's. What is entered here is the transformation it demonstrates: on the ground where a water-powered woolen mill had made flannel for a countryside, a rubber works arose that clothed the feet of a continent, without the works ever moving.

Sources:

1. The History of Ball Band, the company's own published history (Michiana Memory, St. Joseph County Public Library) — the woolen mill of about 1838, the twenty-five employees, the 1867 purchase, the discontinuance of flannel and yarn as the knit boot took over, and the rubber decision of 1897.
2. Goodspeed Brothers, Pictorial and Biographical Memoirs of Elkhart and St. Joseph Counties (1893) — the 1886 reorganization at $200,000 capital and the 140 to 150 employees and $200,000 of annual business about 1893; carried whole in this build's Ball Band section.
3. Bankers Trust Co. v. Higgins, 65 F. Supp. 836 (S.D.N.Y. 1946), findings of fact — Saunders as "the chief and most active executive" of what the court called "the largest manufacturer of rubber boots and overshoes in the country."
4. IU South Bend Archives, finding-aid abstract of the company's records — subsidiary of the United States Rubber Company in 1922; over 200 sales representatives and over 60,000 retailers worldwide in 1933.
5. Ball-Band Factory marker, Mishawaka — the vacuum-pressure method of vulcanization, printed as the marker states it; and the works' employment course as the Ball Band section carries it (nearly 2,000 in 1903; 5,000 by 1923; forty-three acres).
6. This build's Ball Band section — the works' full record, cross-referenced and not retold.