War and consolidation: the missing 1904, and 1914 and 1919

Census years 1904, 1914 and 1919 · the Abstract's comparative table

There is no 1904 row. The federal government counted manufactures again in 1904, a census of manufactures only, and the comparative table the Bureau later built — Table 193 of the Abstract of the Census of Manufactures 1919, which carries each sizable city back through 1919, 1914, 1909 and 1904 — gives Mishawaka lines for 1919, 1914 and 1909, and no line for 1904. The city had stood at 5,560 people in 1900, below the class the table draws from; the absence is the record's, searched and found, and it fixes the start of the comparable series at 1909. The horsepower column for 1904 stands blank across the whole table — the Bureau did not collect it that year — so no 1904 power figure exists for any city in this instrument.

1914 and 1919 show the works swallowing the shops. In 1914 the city counted 52 establishments — ten more than in 1909 — employing an average of 3,332 wage earners, with $13,546,000 of capital, $1,898,000 of wages, $5,731,000 of materials, products of $12,304,000, value added of $6,573,000 and 8,255 primary horsepower. Five years later, at the end of the war decade, the count reads 32 establishments — twenty fewer — employing 5,068 wage earners, half again as many; capital nearly doubled to $25,817,000; wages $5,688,000; materials $14,028,000; products $27,765,000; value added $13,737,000; horsepower 11,261. The same figures stand in two carriers — the Abstract's Table 193 and Table 34 of the Fourteenth Census's manufactures volume (Vol. IX, ch. 3, p. 399) — read from both, and they agree to the digit. The Abstract states its money in thousands of dollars; its 1909 line is the exact Thirteenth Census row carried at that rounding, and it agrees at rounding in every column. What the two rows prove together is the consolidation the works histories describe from inside: between 1914 and 1919 Mishawaka's manufacturing did not spread across more shops — it concentrated into far fewer and far larger works, and the average establishment's wage force rose from about sixty-four hands to about a hundred and fifty-eight.

Sources:

1. Abstract of the Census of Manufactures 1919 (Bureau of the Census, 1923), ch. 5, Table 193 — statistics for cities having 10,000 inhabitants or more, 1919, 1914, 1909 and 1904: Mishawaka, pp. 300–301, read from the page images (money in thousands of dollars as printed).
2. Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920, Vol. IX, Manufactures 1919, ch. 3, Table 34: Mishawaka, p. 399, read from the page image; identical figures.