The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1941 – 1949
The war plant: The core of Mishawaka's second home front was industrial, and it is told whole in the Ball Band leg: the works that began fabricating self-sealing fuel cells in 1941, built the bomb-bay and crawlway tanks that stretched the Doolittle raiders' range in February 1942 and received Doolittle's own visit and telegram after the raid of April 18, 1942, and employed 9,446 men and women at its 1943 peak by the city history's count — "nearly 10,000" on the state marker — more than half of them women on the victory shift. That account stands in Ball Band and is pointed to here, not repeated; the same leg carries Dodge's war course and the Ensolite that went into military boots, jackets, and pants in the Korean years.
One household's war: At the scale of a single house, the Notre Dame Archives hold the scrapbook of Clarence and Mabel Powell of Mishawaka, who between 1942 and 1945 opened their home to the Navy's midshipmen training at Notre Dame — one hundred fifty of them, by the Powells' own claim as the archives record it — and kept the clippings, letters, and photographs the young officers sent back. It is the town's home front at its most documented small scale: a Mishawaka couple's spare rooms as part of the machine that officered a navy.
What is not documented: The town's scrap drives, ration boards, bond quotas, and USO work for 1941–45 stand in the wartime Mishawaka EnterpriseWhat the record does prove, in stone and in the National Register, is what Mishawaka built for the men who came home.
Normain Heights: the veterans' subdivision: In January 1946 the city appointed a housing coordinator, J. A. Riggs, against the returning veterans' housing shortage; committees of American Legion Post 161 and of Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 360 took the problem up, joined with United Rubber Workers Local 65 — many of whose members were veterans themselves — and the three bodies together chartered Veterans' Homes of Mishawaka, Inc., the nonprofit that built Normain Heights. The name was chosen in a contest the Legion ran, a contraction of "North Main"; the ground was annexed to the city in November 1946; the groundbreaking came on November 13, 1947. The state marker on the ground, erected in 1997 by the Indiana Historical Bureau and the Beiger Heritage Corporation, gives the result: "Veterans' Homes of Mishawaka, Inc., founded by veterans, 1946, built (1947-1949) to counter housing shortage after World War II. 315 houses built on battle-named streets to seven designs; innovative features: aluminum siding, complete kitchen and bath, central heating, landscaping." The subdivision is a National Register historic district, and its street plan is the town's largest war memorial of the domestic kind: a neighborhood whose very street names are a roll of the war's battles, built by the veterans' own organizations for the veterans themselves.
Sources:
- Mishawaka Ball Band leg file, the war plant and the 1943 employment peak, with its sources; Indiana Historical Bureau marker for the Ball-Band factory.
- University of Notre Dame Archives, Clarence Powell Scrapbook (POW), 1942–1945, collection description.
- Indiana Historical Bureau marker 71.1997.1, Normain Heights Subdivision (1997), inscription; National Register of Historic Places nomination, Normain Heights Historic District (Veterans' Homes of Mishawaka, the posts' and Local 65's committees, the 1946 charter and annexation, the name contest).
- Mishawaka spine leg file, Normain Heights groundbreaking, November 13, 1947.