Temperance as an actor on this plant

1834 — 1918

The crusade's local course, at pointer size: Mishawaka organized a temperance society in 1834, the year of its first iron furnace, and took offense at a saloon opened just outside its limits; the fight's whole course — the society, the Washingtonians, the dry-law controversies — stands in the Bars & Nightclubs and Controversies sections of this history, and the Controversies record prints the companion negative: no saloon-license controversy or local-option fight over the brewery stands in the record reached, because the city's saloons and its brewery were regulated from Indianapolis and Washington, not from Mishawaka's council chamber. What belongs to this section is only what the crusade did to the works on North Center Street, and it did it in two dated strokes, both from above.

The first stroke: Indiana's own dry law, April 1918: For this plant, Prohibition is not an atmosphere; it is a closing date for beer, and the date is Indiana's, not the nation's. Indiana's statewide prohibition took hold in April 1918, ahead of the federal amendment, and the brewery's beer record stops there with a ruler's edge: the trade timeline's beer brands run to 1918, and from 1918 the house at West 2nd Street made no beer at all. A plant producing 75,000 barrels a year lost its product by statute in a single month — that is temperance acting on a works, separately from the national Prohibition that then held the closure in place for fifteen more years.

The second stroke, and the plant's answer: The federal amendment's work on this plant was not to close it but to fix the terms of its survival: the house converted — kettles to cereal beverage, the works to soda, distilled water, and ice — in the course the next entry reads off its products. No raid, padlock case, or prosecution of the company itself appears in the record this section reached; the dry years' enforcement record for Mishawaka — the still raids of October 1921, the Midway case of 1930 — stands in the Crime section, and it is a record of the company's customers and competitors in the illegal trade, not of the company. The distinction is printed deliberately: on the evidence reached, Kamm & Schellinger's Prohibition was a product conversion, not a court record.

Sources:

1. Bars & Nightclubs and Controversies sections of this history — the temperance society of 1834 and the dry-law record whole; the negative for any local license fight over the brewery, with its settling sources named there.
2. Tavern Trove, brewery record — the beer brands run to 1918; no beer made 1918–1933.
3. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — "Indiana's anti-liquor law and the federal Prohibition amendment forced Kamm & Schellinger to cease their alcohol production"; 75,000 barrels annually by 1918.
4. Crime section of this history — the still raids of October 1921 and the dry years' enforcement record, cross-referenced, not retold.