The railroad and the factory town, in brief

OCTOBER 4, 1851, AND AFTER

The railroad reached the town the water power had made: On October 4, 1851, the Michigan Southern railroad's first train came into Mishawaka behind the locomotive John Strycker, tying the races' town to Detroit and Chicago by rail and ending its dependence on the river and the wagon roads. What the railroad found was already a factory town, and what it made of it — the woolen mills that became Ball Band, the rubber works, the carriage and cabinet shops, the foundries that succeeded the bog-iron furnace on the same industrial ground — is the substance of the Business and Industry sections of this record, and the Story of Mishawaka section does not retell it here. One line of that record belongs to the Story of Mishawaka section's frame, because a contrary version circulates: the Ball Band works — Uniroyal's in its last decades — did not shut down in the 1960s; Uniroyal announced the transfer of its footwear lines out of Mishawaka on March 22, 1968, and the lines were gone by 1969, but the plant worked on for twenty-eight more years in fuel cells, insulation and adhesives and closed for good only in 1997, its buildings imploded on June 17, 2000. Two spine-level facts belong to those sections' frame. The town's second industrial life ran on the same two assets as its first: water power first, then steam and rail, on a site the furnace had already organized for manufacture. And its workforce remade the town's peoples — the Belgian and German, Polish and Italian, and later Black and Mexican Mishawaka of the factory age — whose record stands in the Communities section. By 1900 the town the railroad had reached counted 5,560 people; by 1910, on the annexations and the factory boom together, it would count 11,886 and stand a city in fact a decade after it had become one in law.

Sources:

1. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — the first train of October 4, 1851 and the locomotive John Strycker; the factory succession in outline.
2. Census volumes as cited in the population entry below — the 1900 and 1910 counts framing the railroad-age growth.