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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 employer at more than 1,200 persons (the Businesses file owns the company's whole course, through Reliance, Rockwell, Baldor, ABB, and the $2.9 billion RBC Bearings acquisition of 2021 — a division's price in a Connecticut bearing maker's purchase, not a Mishawaka family's fortune, and it is not counted as one here). Wallace Dodge died in September 1894, and the presidency passed to Melvin W. Mix, the man who had built the company's selling machine; Howard's 1907 biography of Mix records that under him the business more than doubled in a decade. Mix's house — the Mix Mansion of the Neighborhoods file — was the Dodge fortune's great house, and it was razed in 1968 for the ground it stood on.
Its scale: None, in print, as a personal fortune. No estate, probate, or sale figure for Wallace Dodge, and none for Melvin W. Mix, appears in the sources consulted — not in Howard's biographies, not in the company's histories, not in the marker and brownfield records that price the plant's ground in our own century. The Dodge money is the largest Mishawaka fortune that cannot be given a personal number on this record: it is documented at the scale of a works — 40 buildings on 65 acres by 1902, the city's largest payroll by 1910 — and the gap is stated rather than filled. The Mix family of Mix's department store, carried in the People file, is a separate family and a separate record, and is not merged with the Dodge president's line here.
Sources:
- Businesses file of this build — the 1878 founding and Magic Jack patent; the 1881 lightning fire and 1882 Split Pulley patent; the 1902 plant of 40 buildings and 65 acres; the 1910 employment above 1,200; Wallace Dodge's death in September 1894 and Mix's succession; the acquisition chain to RBC Bearings (announced 26 July 2021, $2.9 billion for the Dodge business as a division).
- Howard, A History of St. Joseph County (1907), biography of Melvin W. Mix, as carried in the Businesses file — the business more than doubled in a decade under Mix.
- Neighborhoods file of this build — the Mix Mansion, the Dodge president's house, razed in 1968.