"The largest center of heavy industry west of Detroit" — the iron decade

1835 – 1845, on Merle Blue's judgment

The claim. The historian Merle Blue's judgment, carried in the city history and repeated in this history's spine and industrial files at his strength, holds that in the decade before the mid-1840s Mishawaka "was the largest center of heavy industry in the entire Great Lakes area west of Detroit." It is the largest sentence ever written about this city's industry, and it is a judgment rather than a measurement — which is not the same as untestable. A judgment about a comparison class can be checked against the class.

The record. Mishawaka's side is documented hard. The St. Joseph Iron Works' blast furnace was built from 1833 on the present site of the city and blown in in 1834 — the first successful iron furnace in Indiana, on Howard L. Balsley's study, "Indiana Iron from Native Ore," in the Indiana Magazine of History, and on the state historical marker that stands on the ground; the 1837 dam and its races, the forge, and the mill row followed, all carried whole in the industrial file. The comparison class is what the claim turns on. Chicago, the one lakes place west of Detroit that would outgrow every other, had in 1839–40 — on A. T. Andreas's History of Chicago (1884), listing the trades from the city's own early directories — a handful of small founding and machine shops: a foundry of 1839, the Chicago Eagle Foundry of 1840, machinists and brass founders, jobbing work all of it. The Encyclopedia of Chicago, the Chicago History Museum's reference, states the frame exactly: by the beginning of the 1850s the city had several iron foundries, melting preprocessed iron — purchased pig iron, not ore — and "the first large iron and steel plant in the Chicago area" was Eber B. Ward's North Chicago Rolling Mill, founded in 1857, twelve years after Blue's decade closes. Milwaukee and Toledo in 1840 were places of the low thousands of people, with no iron works of record in the literature reached. Detroit is outside the claim by its own terms; Buffalo and Cleveland are east of it.

The verdict. Partly supported — at exactly the strength of a historian's judgment, which is the strength its carriers give it. No instrument of the 1840s enumerated "heavy industry" by place: the census of manufactures counted by county and by kind, not by a category the claim uses, so the sentence cannot be confirmed as a measurement, and the settling instrument is named for the update pass — the 1840 census's manufactures schedules read across the counties of the lakes country. But every point the record can reach checks in Blue's favor: no blast furnace and no large iron works west of Detroit is documented anywhere in the decade, on either shore of either lake, while Mishawaka's furnace, dam, and races are documented in the scholarly record and marked on the ground. The documented sentence, narrower and harder than Blue's, is that for that decade Mishawaka was the lakes country's only blast-furnace town west of Detroit — and on that sentence, the judgment he built on it stands as a fair reading of the record he had.

Sources:

1. Howard L. Balsley, "Indiana Iron from Native Ore," Indiana Magazine of History — the St. Joseph blast furnace built from 1833 on the present site of Mishawaka, the first successful iron furnace in Indiana; the bog-ore course of the works.
2. Indiana Historical Bureau, the St. Joseph Iron Works marker — the furnace's primacy and dates as the state prints them on the ground.
3. Encyclopedia of Chicago (Chicago History Museum), "Iron and Steel" and "North Chicago Rolling Mill Co." — Chicago's early foundries melting preprocessed ingots by the early 1850s; the North Chicago Rolling Mill of 1857 as "the first large iron and steel plant in the Chicago area."
4. A. T. Andreas, History of Chicago (1884) — the city's iron trade of 1839–40 as a handful of small foundries and machine shops (Granger's foundry, 1839; the Eagle Foundry, 1840; the Rankins; Stow).
5. This history's spine and industrial-revolution files — Blue's sentence at his strength; the dam, races, and mill row at their documented size.