Mishawaka Wineries and Distilleries: Wagner's Still, Kamm & Schellinger, and the Craft Era

Wineries & Distilleries · The makers: Wagner's still, Kamm & Schellinger, and the craft era

Mishawaka's drink industry begins earlier than its brewery's famous name, and it begins with both halves of this section at once: the city's commissioned history records John Wagner operating a brewery and a distillery in the town from 1839, which makes Mishawaka's first documented maker a distiller fourteen years before South Bend's first brewer poured, and gives this city the oldest documented distilling in the county — a record that then goes silent for a hundred and seventy-five years. What follows is that record whole: Wagner's fire and his 1853 rebuilding; the Kamm and Schellinger lines, each traced before their union; the brewery as a company, its incorporation carried in two datings that are both printed; the Pilsner years and the barrels counted at three dates; the succession into the second Kamm generation, with the one stretch of it the record does not name left as a named gap; temperance and the dry law as actors on this one plant; the Prohibition course read off the plant's own products; Repeal, the fatal explosion and the fire the city history names but does not date, and the end in 1951 or 1952, carried two ways; the ground after brewing, where no outside brewer ever succeeded, as one did across the river; the distillers searched for and not found between Wagner and the vodka makers of Grape Road; the brewpub era from the pizza palace on North Main to the taproom at the Ironworks; and wine and mead, which this city's record does not hold at all, printed as the negatives they are. Two limits stand at the front. The plant's own papers do not survive in any source this section reached, so the brewery is read through the register text, the city history, the trade timeline, one litigated insurance case, and the directories — strong carriers, named in every entry. And South Bend's makers are this section's boundary, not its subject: they stand here at pointer size, in their own city's build in full.