The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
Wealth · Fortunes Made, Kept, and Given Away
Mishawaka's money has a different shape from its neighbor's. South Bend's record holds a wagon fortune and a plow fortune that can be priced from estate litigation and front-page sales; Mishawaka's fortunes were mostly made one factory at a time, and the published record prices them unevenly — an incorporation here, a patent sale there, a widow's probate at the end. The town's founding speculation is documented at its entry price and nowhere else: eight hundred dollars bought the townsite, and no ledger of the return survives in print. Its first great industrial fortune, the wagon money of George Milburn, was made here in twenty years and then taken away — to Toledo in 1873, on a railroad siding the town would not help him build — and the fortune it accidentally launched, the Studebakers', belongs to South Bend's record. The fortune that stayed, the Beigers', produced the only personal estate in Mishawaka's published record priced above a million dollars, and that figure is a widow's: Susie Beiger's $1.55 million, printed by the house she built. After her, the record thins in a particular way — the Dodge and Kamm and Eberhart money is documented as companies, not as estates — until the dealer era, when the fortunes show again, but only in their giving: a million-dollar professorship in 2000, and a family foundation's published grants in the present century.
Every figure in this section is a figure somebody published: a capitalization in a charter or a company history, a price in a deed record or a newspaper of the day, an estate total in a house's or a newspaper's account of a will, a gift in a university's release, a foundation's grants in its own annual report. Where sources disagree, both figures are carried. Where no figure was ever published, this section says so. Superlatives — first millionaire, largest, richest — are printed as the claims of the records that carry them, never in this history's own voice.
Part One: The Founding Money
Alanson M. Hurd: Eight Hundred Dollars of Townsite, and No Ledger of the Return
1832 – 1835, and the record after
The fortune: Mishawaka begins as one man's speculation, and its entry price is the best-documented figure in this section. Alanson M. Hurd, a Detroit businessman, heard of the bog-iron deposits south of the St. Joseph River, sent…
George Milburn: The Wagon Fortune Mishawaka Made and Toledo Kept
1847 – 1883
The fortune: George Milburn (born 3 June 1820 at Alston, England; died 1883) came to Mishawaka by way of a Goshen dry-goods counter and a Kosciusko County farm, settling in the town in 1847–49 and entering business as clerk, then…
Part Two: The Industrial Fortunes
Martin V. Beiger: The First Millionaire
1847 – 1903
The fortune: Martin Valentine Beiger (born 3 February 1847 in St. Joseph County; a private of Company H, 138th Indiana Volunteers in 1864) entered business in the river mill his father Jacob had bought in 1867 — the woolen mill…
The Beiger Descent: A Widow's $1.55 Million, Willed to a House
1903 – 1989
What became of it: The largest personal estate figure in Mishawaka's published record belongs to Susie Beiger, and it survives because she willed the fortune to the house it had built. The mansion's own history states it whole…
The Eberharts: Flour, Wagons, and the $100,000 Half of a Boot Patent
1853 – 1893, and the line after
The fortune: The Eberhart money is the oldest industrial money in Mishawaka that stayed, and it ran in three trades at once. The family's flour milling stands in the record from the 1850s — A. & J. H. Eberhart & Co., millers, in…
Frederick George Eberhart: The Rubber-Era Eberhart — a Golf Course, a Mansion, a Library's Ground
1914 – 1931, and the gifts
The fortune: The second Eberhart fortune in this record is the younger Frederick George Eberhart — the Ball Band president's son of the Ball Band file's people record, separated there from his same-named father, the 1886…
The Dodge Money: A Fortune Documented as a Company, Not an Estate
1878 – 1894, and the succession
The fortune: Wallace Harlow Dodge, Mishawaka-born, founded the Dodge Manufacturing Company in 1878 on his 1878 Magic Jack patent — the wagon jack whose Split Pulley patent of 1882 made the firm, by 1910, the city's largest…
The Kamm Money: Beer, a Brother-in-Law's Milling Wealth, and an Island's Name
1870 – 1951
The fortune: The Kamm fortune was a family firm in the literal sense, and its one published capitalization is the record's measure of it. The brewery on the river — John Wagner's of 1850 — was bought in 1870 by Adolph Kamm (born…
The Second Tier: Windmills, Axes, and the Fortunes Print Does Not Size
1869 – 1925
The Perkins brothers: Palmer C. Perkins bought the idle Bement axe factory and turned it to the solid wooden-wheel windmill of his 1869 patent (No. 93,472); his twin brother Pardon Joshua Perkins joined him in 1871, and on 14…
Part Three: The Banking Money
Banking: One Charter, No Sized Fortune
1854 – 1983
The test: South Bend's wealth record has a banking fortune at its center; Mishawaka's does not, and the absence is documented rather than assumed. The town's first bank never opened — the Bank of Mishawaka free bank of 1854…
Part Four: The Dealer Fortunes
Jordan H. Kapson: The Dealer Fortune, Priced by Its Gift
1926 – 2006
The fortune: Jordan H. 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…
The Leep Family: A Living Fortune, Printed Only in Its Giving
1973 or 1977 – present
The record, at the leg's rule: The Leep family heads the Gurley Leep Automotive Family of Mishawaka, the largest dealer group seated in the city, and its principals are living. Under this section's standing rule, what is printed…
Part Five: The Tests, and What Remains Pooled
The Tests: The 1892 List, the Richest-Man Question, and Forbes
1892 – 2026
The 1892 list: The New-York Tribune 's American Millionaires (1892), its survey of Americans "reputed to be worth a million or more," counted thirty-seven millionaires in Indiana, of whom three were in South Bend, on the…
The Pooled Afterlife: A Widow's Trust and Its Corporation
1927 – present
What it is: In Fort Wayne and South Bend the largest pool of private charitable wealth seated in the city today is a community foundation. Mishawaka's equivalent is smaller and older-fashioned: the pooled remnant of a single…
The Shape of It, in Sum
Mishawaka's wealth record divides, like its neighbor's, into what documents can size and what they cannot — but the proportions are reversed. South Bend's ledger opens with a founding speculation priced to the cent and closes…
The Fur and Trade Fortune: The Burnetts, Coquillard, and the Removal Contracts
1776–1851 · the valley trader line, at fortune size and at this ground's share
The shape of the fortune: Before the townsite speculation that opens this section, the valley's first fortune-form was trade: furs and goods moving down the St. Joseph to the lake, treaty money moving up it, and — in the trade's…