War Work in Cloth

1934–1950s · Mishawaka (boundary)

What the record reached verifies, it verifies plainly. Ball-Band's coated-fabrics line began in 1934, fusing fabric with natural and synthetic rubbers; its first coated fabric, Leatherette, was used for clothing, and raincoats were made at the Mishawaka factory. In the Second World War the plant employed nearly ten thousand workers, and in 1943 women made up more than half the labour force, working the "victory shift" — but the war product the marker record names is not cloth: from 1941 the factory fabricated self-sealing fuel containers for B-25 Mitchell and B-26 Marauder bombers and U.S. Navy PT boats. Cloth war work returns in the Korean War, when the plant's Ensolite foam was used in boots, jackets, and pants worn by the military. Of the row's four named products — raincoats, diving suits, aviator boots, army socks — one, raincoats, is verified as made at Mishawaka; the other three are not verified in any open source reached, and are not printed as made there. Named gap (in part): diving suits, aviator boots, and army socks as Mishawaka contract products are uncoverable from open sources. Their settling sources are the company's own records as kept in the Michiana Memory / St. Joseph County Public Library Ball-Band collections and the Uniroyal corporate record, with the Tribune's war-contract files as cross-check. Osceola's share: no cloth war work was seated in the town or township in any record reached; the township's war work in cloth was the factory work its residents travelled to, in Mishawaka.

Sources: Ball-Band Factory historical marker text (HMdb), read whole — coated fabrics 1934, raincoats, the 1941 fuel-container line, wartime employment, Ensolite's Korean War uses.