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1887–1969 · the Ball-Band line in use (boundary product, township wearers)
Carried past the factory gate, the Ball-Band line was work dress for the wet and cold trades: the knit and felt boots and the rubber footwear were sold to farm and outdoor workers, and the period advertising shows the line in use — lumbermen's socks and boots among the wares the ads name — rather than on shelves. The Red Ball Jets carried the mark into children's street wear in the rubber line's later years. A pair of Ball-Band shoes of about 1935 survives in costume collection — held in the Metropolitan Museum / Brooklyn Museum costume holdings — which is the product as worn preserved as dress, not as industrial sample. And the line's last material went to wear of another kind: Ensolite padding in life jackets and athletic mats, and, in Korea, in the boots, jackets, and pants of soldiers (art-52-3). Osceola's share of the product as worn is the whole township share of this section: the boots were worn here, on Penn Township farms and roads, by the people the factory's market and workforce were drawn from — worn on this ground, made across the line in Mishawaka.
Sources: Ball-Band advertising and Michiana Memory records; museum costume-collection records for the c.1935 pair; the marker record for Ensolite's uses.