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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 July 1873 the brothers and four partners formed a joint-stock company with capital of $4,000 — the smallest capitalization in this section, and the honest scale of a fortune's start. The sales line is the growth: 1,500 windmills in 1883 to 5,000 a year in 1899 in Gas Engine Magazine's company history, which pairs the figures with the judgment that Perkins had become the world's largest manufacturer of windmills — the superlative is the magazine's and is printed as its claim. The axe-history record notes the brothers "further invest[ed] in other" ventures, the sentence's object standing whole in the Businesses file. No estate figure for either brother appears in the sources consulted. The company removed to South Bend in the 1920s (the local account dates the complete move to 1925), and the Perkins fortune, such as print sizes it, is a company's sales curve, not an estate.
The rest of the tier: The same statement covers the tier entire. The Bement axe works' principals, the foundry-equipment and paper-cluster makers of the 1889 directory, and the Twin Branch power men all stand in the Businesses file as firms with dated courses; for none of them does a published personal fortune figure — an estate, a probate total, a priced sale of a personal interest — appear in the sources consulted for this section. Mishawaka's nineteenth-century money below the Beiger-Eberhart line is documented as enterprise, and this section prints the tier at that strength rather than borrowing numbers the record does not carry.
Sources:
- Businesses file of this build — the Perkins course whole: the Bement purchase, the 1869 patent, the 1873 joint-stock company at $4,000 capital, the 1883 and 1899 sales figures and the "world's largest" judgment from Gas Engine Magazine's company history, the brothers' further investments in the axe-history record, and the removal to South Bend (1920/1925).