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1847 – 2006
Wallace Harlow Dodge (1849–1894), the jack inventor: Dodge was a Mishawaka man — Discover Indiana, the Indiana Historical Society's place-history program, calls him Mishawaka-born — who patented his Magic Jack, a wagon jack of his own invention, and in 1878 founded the Dodge Manufacturing Company in Mishawaka to make it. The company was incorporated in 1880, by Wallace H. Dodge, William W. Dodge and George Philion, and moved that year to the Union Street site it would occupy for the rest of its life in the city. In 1881 the little factory burned — struck by lightning, in Discover Indiana's account — uninsured, and was rebuilt at once, on a more substantial plan. In 1882 Dodge patented the Independence Wood Split Pulley — 4 July 1882 in Discover Indiana's account — and the pulley changed what the company was: halves bolted around an interchangeable bushing, stocked in standard sizes, clamped onto any shaft, where a solid pulley had been bored for one shaft and was scrap when the shafting changed. Transmission stopped being carpentry and became a catalogue business, and Dodge its catalogue; for the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893, Dodge built the largest rope engine yet made, and it powered the fair. By 1902 the works consisted of forty buildings across sixty-five acres. Dodge died in September 1894, not yet fifty, with the company he had founded at sixteen years old. No estate or probate figure for him appears in the sources consulted — the Wealth section prints the Dodge money as "a fortune documented as a company, not an estate." The company's course after him — Reliance 1967, Rockwell 1995, Baldor 2007, ABB 2011, RBC Bearings' Dodge Industrial from 2 November 2021, headquartered at Simpsonville, South Carolina, and the Union Street ground a brownfield under remediation in 2026 — is the Businesses leg's, whole there.
Jacob Beiger, the mill buyer: Jacob Beiger bought, in 1867, the small wooden woolen mill by the dam — a mill established about 1838, making flannels and yarn with twenty-five employees on the company's own history, and carried in one South Bend Tribune retrospective of 2000 as having supplied the Union Army with blankets, a sentence printed at that retrospective's strength and no stronger. He bought it with his son Martin, and the Mishawaka Woolen Manufacturing Company began the course that made the place. The Beiger Heritage record and the mansion account both date the family's founding act to Jacob's 1867 purchase; the firm's first Beiger years ran as M. V. Beiger & Co. inside the mill his father had bought. Jacob Beiger's own dates and estate do not stand in the sources read at profile strength, and none are printed: his profile is his act — the purchase that put the valley's defining works into the hands of the family that held it for a generation — and the line he founded, which follows.
Martin V. Beiger (1847–1903), the son who made the fortune: Martin Valentine Beiger was born 3 February 1847 in St. Joseph County, a private of Company H, 138th Indiana Volunteers in 1864, and at twenty-one a member of the family firm inside the mill's first Beiger years. The fortune's instrument was a product: the all-knit wool boot he and Adolphus Eberhart brought out in 1886, the first wool boot that held its shape, which carried the black band and, from 1891, the red ball that named the company — Ball Band — in the country's mind. The mill's employment ladder is the fortune's public measure: twenty-five persons at the incorporated company's start on the company's own history (the mansion account says "just 3 employees" at the start — the division stands in the Ball Band file, printed whole), nearly 2,000 by 1903, 5,000 by 1923. The mansion's account states the personal result in the record's own superlative: "By 1900 Martin had become very wealthy and was Mishawaka's first millionaire"; the county visitor bureau adds one word, "first self-made millionaire." Both are carried as their publishers' characterisations. With Mayor Mix and other civic leaders he formed the Mishawaka Public Utilities Company. Planning began in 1900–01 for his house at 317 Lincolnway East — four and a half stories, 21,790 square feet, some forty rooms, designed by Durham and Snyder of South Bend with grounds by Jens Jensen, priced in its reference account at $100,000 — and on 26 September 1903, months into the work, Martin Beiger died of an infection following an operation for appendicitis, aged fifty-six. He did not live in the house his fortune built.
Susie Beiger (died 1927), the widow who priced the fortune: Susie Beiger, née Higgins, a local jeweler's daughter, married Martin Beiger in December 1875; they had no children. She halted the mansion's work at his death, resumed it — the Tribune's later account dates the resumption to 1907 — completed it in 1908, and lived in it from 1909 until her death in 1927, aged sixty-seven, filling it with what she and Martin had bought on their travels in Europe, the Holy Land and the Far East, on the mansion account's itinerary. The couple's civic record stands in one breath in that account: they founded Mishawaka's East United Methodist Church, supported the building of the First United Methodist Church, and established Beiger School. Her will is the largest priced personal document in Mishawaka's record, and its figures stand in conflict, printed whole: the mansion's own history states she "willed $210,000 of her $1.55 million dollar estate to a fund for the maintenance of the home and its furnishings," while the South Bend Tribune's 2006 account of the same will gives an estate of $1.5 million, of which she "designated $200,000" for the trust. Under the will the mansion opened on 1 February 1930 as the Beiger Home for the Elderly, hosted over one hundred women, and operated until 1967; the Beiger Heritage Corporation — the preservation body her trust's income passed to — holds the mansion's interest still and holds protective easements on the old Carnegie library. The childless fortune's descent — mill, mansion, trust, home for the elderly, preservation corporation — is documented at every step, the only Mishawaka fortune of its era for which that can be said.
The Eberharts, and F. G. Eberhart in two generations: The Eberhart money is the oldest industrial money in Mishawaka that stayed. Adolphus Eberhart (born 1824; died 1893 in the CoachBuilt genealogy) ran the flour milling that stands in the period directories as A. & J. H. Eberhart & Co., millers, and the wagon works — A. Eberhart & Co., the Mishawaka Wagon Works — in which George Milburn bought his 1853 interest and which Milburn bought outright in 1858. A generation later Adolphus organised the Mishawaka Woolen Manufacturing Company in 1886 with capital stock of $200,000, on Goodspeed's Memoirs (1893): M. V. Beiger president, F. G. Eberhart vice-president, J. C. Eberhart secretary, A. Eberhart superintendent — and, as co-inventor of the 1886 boot with Martin Beiger, he "sold a half interest in the boot patent to the company for $100,000," the largest priced personal transaction by a Mishawaka industrialist in the nineteenth-century record, retaining a one-third interest and managing until 1887. Frederick George Eberhart the elder is that 1886 vice-president. Frederick George Eberhart the younger — his son, separated from his father whole in the Ball Band file — is the rubber-era Eberhart, a manufacturer with the Rubber & Woolen Company in the 1910 census. His record is three documented acts: credit, by the memorandum of 24 February 1914 on which he and three South Bend men guaranteed a manufacturer's notes, paying $10,154.41 on his guaranty, credited 20 May 1916, and litigating the rest to the Indiana Supreme Court; a library's ground, donating the two-lot site at First and Hill Streets on which the Carnegie library rose with a $30,000 grant, opening 5 May 1916; and a golf course given whole — he bought the St. Joe Valley Country Club's ground when the club closed in 1920, donated the course to the city (it opened as a municipal course in 1929 and carries his name still, the Eberhart-Petro Municipal Golf Course, for Eberhart and Mayor Mason Petro), and kept the bluff plot above it for his own house, the Eberhart Mansion, designed 1929 by Austin & Shambleau and occupied in 1931. No estate total for either Frederick George Eberhart appears in the sources consulted; the younger's fortune's published scale is its acts.
The Mix line — the Dodge president, and a second Mix family the record will not merge: The Dodge president's name stands in conflict and is printed in conflict: the Government fragment carries Melville W. Mix, the manufacturer-mayor of 1902–1906; the Businesses and Coachbuilt records carry Melvin W. Mix (born 16 November 1865 at Atlanta, Illinois; died 11 December 1927 at Chicago), who joined Dodge as a shipping clerk in 1886, was made manager of the Chicago sales branch in 1890, returned to Mishawaka as director of sales, and was elected president on Wallace Dodge's death in September 1894. Howard's 1907 biography records that under Mix the business more than doubled in a decade; by 1910 the Dodge plant covered sixty acres with twenty-five acres of floor space and was Mishawaka's largest employer, at more than 1,200 persons. His Mishawaka holdings beyond Dodge, on the Coachbuilt biography assembled from period sources, were the National Veneer Products Company (the Perfecto line of trunks), the Fast Feed Drill & Tool Corporation, the Lyradion Manufacturing Company (radios and phonographs), and the Mishawaka Public Improvement Corporation, which owned and operated the Hotel Mishawaka — a one-man industrial group of the kind the Midwest's manufacturing towns produced. His house, the Mix Mansion of the Neighborhoods file, was razed in 1968. Separately — and the separation is the record's own — the Wealth fragment states of the department-store line: "The Mix family of Mix's department store, carried in the People file, is a separate family and a separate record, and is not merged with the Dodge president's line here." The banked People file's cross-reference had pointed to "the Mix family, of Mix's department store" in Businesses; no source read for this addendum documents that store family's members by name, dates or course at profile strength. The two Mix records therefore stand side by side, unmerged, exactly as the Wealth fragment rules: the Dodge president at full size above, and the store family as a named thin line whose settling sources are the Mishawaka city directories of its trading years.
Jordan H. Kapson (1926–2006, on the Dealerships file's dates), the dealer: Kapson started in the car business in 1946 selling Nash Ramblers, and in 1949 took the Jefferson Boulevard corner — 609 East Jefferson, first listed that year as Ben Medow's Mishawaka Dodge-Plymouth store, with Medow retained as the young firm's vice-president — that his house held for sixty-seven years: Jordan Motors to Jordan Ford City (by 1963), the Toyota and Volvo and Scion points added, the Jordan Automotive Group's sale to RFJ Auto Partners in 2016 under his son Craig Kapson, and the Ford point's passage to Sonic Automotive in 2021, all whole in the Dealerships record this addendum digs from. No published figure prices his personal estate, and the 2016 sale was announced without a price; his fortune's documented size is its acts, chief among them a gift: in October 2000 the University of Notre Dame announced it "has received a gift of $1 million from Jordan H. Kapson, chairman of the board of The Jordan Automotive Group of Mishawaka, Ind., to establish an endowed professorship in Jewish studies" — the Jordan H. Kapson Chair in Jewish Studies, whose first holder was Hindy Najman, and which remains the largest single published gift by a Mishawaka fortune to any institution in the record reached. The trade press's memorial notice adds the Bette Kapson Sanctuary Fund at Temple Beth-El in South Bend, carrying his wife's name. He died in March 2006 — the memorial, dated 7 March 2006, says he "passed away in his sleep at his home, apparently from a heart attack." His age stands in conflict, printed whole: the Dealerships file carries 1926–2006, while the memorial calls him 82, which would put his birth in 1923 or 1924. One caution the record itself requires, carried from the Wealth fragment: he is Jordan H. Kapson of Mishawaka, not John W. "Jay" Jordan II of Chicago; the two men's records share a surname and a beneficiary and nothing else.
Sources:
- The Businesses fragment of this build — the Dodge Manufacturing article whole (the 1878 founding, the 1881 fire, the 1882 pulley, the 1893 rope engine, the 1902 plant, Wallace Dodge's death in September 1894 and Mix's succession and portfolio, from Discover Indiana, Howard (1907), the Dodge institutional history and the Coachbuilt Mix biography); the families entry (the Eberhart guaranty case, First National Bank of South Bend v. Mayr, 189 Ind. 299 (1920)).
- The Wealth fragment of this build — the Beiger, Beiger-descent, Eberhart, F. G. Eberhart, Dodge-money and Kapson articles whole, from the Beiger Mansion's published history, Goodspeed's Memoirs (1893), the South Bend Tribune (2006), the National Register records, the University of Notre Dame's release of 8 October 2000 and Automotive Fleet's memorial of 7 March 2006; and its ruling separating the department-store Mix family from the Dodge president's line.
- The Ball Band fragment of this build — Jacob Beiger's 1867 purchase of the mill by the dam, the 1838 mill and its twenty-five employees, and the separation of the two Frederick George Eberharts.