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1874–1969 · Mishawaka (boundary); no garment made in Osceola in the record reached
The product the city sold the country is the Ball-Band boot and shoe line of Mishawaka. The makers, in succession: the Mishawaka Woolen Manufacturing Company, incorporated 1874 on a woollen-mill lineage running back through Martin V. Beiger (1867) to a mill of about 1838; then the Mishawaka Rubber & Woolen Manufacturing Company; the line passed in the twentieth century to United States Rubber and finally Uniroyal, and footwear production ended in 1969. The product in its materials, as the row directs, material by material: knit — the all-knit boot invented in 1886 by Martin V. Beiger and Adolphus Eberhart and produced from November 1887, a boot knitted whole rather than cut and sewn; felt — felt boots added about 1895; rubber — rubber footwear decided on in 1897, the first crude rubber washed on Christmas Day 1897, and the first ticket of rubber shoes run on 23 February 1898; and in the later line, canvas and leather goods and the coated fabrics of art-52-3. The name itself is a materials mark: the black band dyed along the boot's top edge, the red ball added after imitators copied the band, and "Ball-Band" with the Red Ball trademark registered in 1901. At its height the works covered some forty acres of floor space with some five thousand personnel, and its advertising claimed sixty thousand stores and more than ten million wearers. Osceola's share of the signature product is the wearer's share, not the maker's: no garment or boot was made in Osceola or Penn Township in any record reached, and the township's part in Ball-Band is the part of the countryside around the factory — its workers' and customers' ground.
Sources: Michiana Memory / St. Joseph County Public Library, History of Ball Band; the Ball-Band Factory historical marker record (HMdb) for the corporate succession and the 1969 footwear end.