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 the period directories — and Jacob Eberhart's line carried the flour and woolen works into the Ball Band story (Businesses and the Ball Band file own the firms). Adolphus Eberhart (born 1824, in Goodspeed's biography) is the fortune's central figure, and his course crosses this section twice: it was his wagon works — A. Eberhart & Co., the Mishawaka Wagon Works — in which George Milburn bought his 1853 interest and which Milburn bought outright in 1858; and it was Adolphus Eberhart who, a generation later, organized the woolen company's transformation. Goodspeed's Memoirs (1893) state that Eberhart "organized the Mishawaka Woolen Manufacturing Company" in 1886 with capital stock of $200,000 — eight times the 1874 capital — and print the reorganized roster: M. V. Beiger president, F. G. Eberhart vice-president, J. C. Eberhart secretary, A. Eberhart superintendent; the directors included Clement and J. M. Studebaker of South Bend, and in November 1887 a half interest in the company was sold to the Studebaker brothers, the wagon fortune buying into the woolen one (the Ball Band file carries the transactions whole).

Its scale: One transaction prices the Eberhart hand exactly. Eberhart, co-inventor of the 1886 boot, "sold a half interest in the boot patent to the company for $100,000" — Goodspeed's biography as carried in the Ball Band file, which calls it the single largest documented transaction of the company's woolen era and the measure of what the partners believed the boot was worth. He retained a one-third interest in the company, managed until 1887, and took the superintendent's chair in the reorganized firm at sixty-two. By about 1893 the company he had organized employed 140 to 150 persons and did $200,000 of annual business. No probate or estate total for Adolphus Eberhart (d. 1893 in the CoachBuilt genealogy; Goodspeed's biography is his lifetime record) appears in the sources consulted, and none is stated here; the fortune's published size is the $200,000 capitalization he organized and the $100,000 he took for half his patent — the largest priced personal transaction by a Mishawaka industrialist in the nineteenth-century record.

Sources:

1. Goodspeed Brothers, Pictorial and Biographical Memoirs (1893), biography of Adolphus Eberhart, as carried in the Ball Band file — his wagon and flouring-mill course; the 1886 organization at $200,000 capital and its officer roster; the $100,000 sale of a half interest in the boot patent; the retained one-third interest; the 140–150 employees and $200,000 of annual business about 1893.
2. The History of Ball Band (company history), as carried in the Ball Band file — the November 1887 sale of a half interest in the company to John M. and Clement Studebaker.
3. Businesses file of this build — A. & J. H. Eberhart & Co., millers, in the period directories; the Eberhart flour milling's ground and course.
4. CoachBuilt.com, "Milburn Wagon Company" — A. Eberhart & Co. as the Mishawaka Wagon Works and Adolphus Eberhart's dates (1824–1893).