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1833 — 2021 · FIRM BY FIRM, IN THE SPINE
The furnace and the water-power cluster: The cluster begins where the Story of Mishawaka section begins: Hurd's blast furnace of 1833–34, the first successful iron furnace in Indiana, blown in on bog ore and charcoal, and the dam of 1837 — 577 feet long, $38,000 — whose races on both banks lined the town with mills and made it, on Merle Blue's judgment, the largest center of heavy industry in the Great Lakes country west of Detroit for the decade 1835–45. When the bog ore gave out, the ground, the races and the habit of manufacture remained, and the railroad-age cluster grew on them.
The woolen and rubber anchor — Ball Band: A wooden woolen mill stood by the dam from about 1838; Jacob Beiger and his son Martin bought it in 1867, and the Mishawaka Woolen Manufacturing Company made its first fortune on the all-knit wool boot of 1886 — Martin V. Beiger and Adolphus Eberhart's boot, the first wool boot that held its shape — carrying a black band, then from 1891 a red ball, the mark registered with the Ball-Band name in 1901. In 1897, under the Goodyear superintendent E. A. Saunders, the company became a rubber company too, washing its first crude rubber on Christmas Day 1897. A subsidiary of United States Rubber from 1922, renamed for it in 1923, the works covered forty-three acres and employed 5,000 across a dozen product lines by 1937; its war peak of 9,446 in 1943 and its Doolittle tanks stand in the war beat above. Its ending came in two blows twenty-nine years apart, carried in the remaking beat below.
The power-transmission anchor — Dodge: Wallace H. Dodge founded his company in Mishawaka in 1878 to make his Magic Wagon Jack, moved in 1880 to 500 South Union Street, burned uninsured by lightning in 1881 and rebuilt at once, and in 1882 patented the Independence Wood Split Pulley — the split pulley on an interchangeable bushing that made power transmission a catalogue business and Dodge its catalogue, with the Dodge American rope-drive system behind it and the largest rope engine yet made, built for Chicago's 1893 exposition, as its advertisement. Under Melville Mix, president from Wallace Dodge's death in 1894, the plant was by 1910 the city's largest employer, more than 1,200 persons on sixty acres. The independent company's course ended with Reliance Electric's acquisition in 1967; the name ran on through Rockwell (1995), Baldor (2006–07) and ABB (2011) to RBC Bearings' Dodge Industrial (2 November 2021), headquartered in South Carolina, while the Union Street foundry worked on as RMG Foundry to a second closing in July 2006 and stands in 2026 a brownfields remediation site with the 1999 state marker at its gate.
The rest of the cluster, each at its size: Perkins Wind Mill — Palmer C. Perkins's 1869 patent mill, built on the Bement axe works on Bridge Street, 1,500 windmills in 1883 and 5,000 a year by 1899 on the trade history's figures, receivership in 1917 and the remnant gone to South Bend by 1920 in one telling, 1925 in the other, both printed in the businesses record. Wheelabrator — Verne E. Minich's foundry-equipment company, consolidated on an eighty-three-acre Mishawaka site on 1 January 1926, whose 1933 airless blast-cleaning Wheelabrator named the firm; Mishawaka was its principal plant and world headquarters into the 1970s, at some 1,500 employees, before the work left in pieces in the 1980s. Kamm & Schellinger — John Wagner's brewery of 1853 at 100 Center Street, Adolph Kamm's and Nicholas Schellinger's from the 1870s, incorporated 1883, carried through Prohibition on cereal beverages and soda, brewing again from 1933, closed in 1951 on the marker's dating, 1952 on the Tribune's, both printed. Twin Branch — the power cluster: the dam east of the city, first power 16 December 1903, the tallest dam with a hydroelectric station on Indiana's St. Joseph, its steam station (in service by 1927, fed by its own two-mile railroad) shut in June 1978, and the hydro plant generating still in 2026, the oldest hydro facility in the American Electric Power fleet. The paper and pulp houses of the 1889 roster — Gaylor Pulp, Indiana Paper, Mishawaka Pulp, Stokes's wood-pulp mill — stand at directory size in the businesses record, with the wagon, furniture, organ and felting shops of the same page. And the truck works of the next century, AM General on McKinley Highway — the Humvee builder, 800 employees on the Chamber's 2020 count, its civilian H2 chapter ending with the suspension of January 2009 — holds its own flagship record in this build and stands here at anchor size.
Sources:
- The businesses and ball-band fragments of this build, with their carriers — Dodge: the Indiana Historical Bureau marker at 500 South Union Street, Discover Indiana, the company's own timeline, Howard (1907), Foundry Management & Technology (2 July 2006) and the city's 2026 brownfields notice. Ball Band: Bock's 1937 company history, the Ball-Band Factory marker, the IU South Bend Archives abstract, De Kever. Perkins: Gas Engine Magazine's company history and the city's 2014 marker. Wheelabrator: the company's 1964 history and 1976 magazine, the Auburn University case study. Kamm & Schellinger: the Historical Bureau marker and National Register listing, the period company account, Tavern Trove, the Tribune's 1993 retrospective. Twin Branch: the National Inventory of Dams, the Monon Society's line history, I&M's 2024 hydro account.
- The Story of Mishawaka section fragment — the furnace of 1833–34, the dam of 1837, and Merle Blue's judgment on the water-power decade.