The race economy, counted in 1889

1837–1889

The system's maturity was a directory page: The water-power town arranged itself by altitude, and the arrangement is described in the scholarship the town produced. Ward Baker's study of Mishawaka on the eve of the Civil War, resting on the Hydraulic Company's records and the press of 1837, puts it in one sentence: "Factories occupied the low land along the river bank and the race, while private residences and business houses were along the streets to the south." Power at the bottom of the bank, life above it — the geography the dam had dictated held for the whole race era. The fullest single census of that economy is not a census at all but a trade directory: the Directory of Indiana Manufacturers and Buyers' Guide for 1889, whose Mishawaka page the Businesses section prints firm by firm. Read as a system rather than a roster, the page is the race economy at its documented fullest, in a town the directory itself gives as 3,200 people on two railroads: a woolen mill; two pulley works — Dodge, and the Keasey Pulley Company beside it, a second maker in the trade Dodge was making the town's signature; a windmill and axe company; four paper and pulp houses (the A. Gaylor Pulp Manufacturing Company, the Indiana Paper Company, the Mishawaka Pulp Company, and M. W. Stokes's wood pulp mill) — ground pulp wanting exactly what the races offered, falling water and timber within haul; a felting company; two furniture factories; an organ maker; a wagon company as the directory lists it; a flour mill; two saw mills; a cooper; a maker of wells and pumps; and an ice and steam wood-sawing concern. Two features of the page are the transformation in miniature. The first is depth: beneath the famous names stands a bench of small shops — felting, organs, coffins' kin, barrel staves' kin — processing the countryside's wool, timber, grain and rags at the scale the fall allowed, the artisan generation industrialized but not yet consolidated. The second is the paper cluster: pulp is the race economy's most power-hungry trade, and four houses of it in a town of 3,200 mark the moment water power itself, not any single product, was the town's export-grade asset. The cluster's later course is thin in the record reached — the Businesses section names the paper trade's own directories as its settling source, and prints a papermaker still working at Mishawaka in a trade-journal notice of 1916 — and that thinness stands here as it stands there. What the 1889 page proves whole is the system's shape at the hinge of the century: a town that made, among much else, the machines that made power usable — pulleys and windmills — and that ground its own river's fall into pulp. The firms are profiled in Businesses; the page, as a portrait of the whole, is this section's.

Sources:

1. Directory of Indiana Manufacturers and Buyers' Guide (1889), the Mishawaka page, as transcribed by Genealogy Trails — the full manufacturing roster, the town's population given as 3,200, its railroads the Chicago & Grand Trunk and the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern; the roster stands whole in this build's Businesses section.
2. Ward Baker, "Mishawaka on the Eve of Conflict," Indiana Magazine of History — the factories on the low land along the bank and the race, residences and business houses on the streets to the south; the account's basis in the Mishawaka Hydraulic Company's records and the South Bend Free Press of 14 October 1837.
3. This build's Businesses section — the paper and pulp cluster's entry and its named gap, and the 1916 Paper Trade Journal notice of a papermaker formerly employed at Mishawaka; cross-referenced.