The labor the works drew: named owners from New York and the farm townships — and no hands count anywhere in the record

The works on this ground drew their people the way the settlement itself was drawn — as families, not as a recruited workforce: the mill seat's proprietors came with the settlement migration. Zelotes Bancroft's atlas line gives his origin in one word — "New York" (1875 atlas directory, sec. 16, settled 1834 on that line's dating, printed unreconciled with the county histories in item 1 above) — and the Bancroft memoirs bring the family in stages, Zelotes first, his father William sent for after (Goodspeed, 1893). Around the seat, the named hands of the works are the owners themselves and their kin: the 1856 mill "owned and conducted by a nephew" of the Bancroft brothers in 1880 (Chapman, p. 790); Henry S. Plumb, who married Zelotes Bancroft's daughter Alma the day after arriving in the county in 1864 and opened the village's first named store in 1870 (Chapman, p. 834); Frederick Lang, miller from 1864 with his Mishawaka lumber yard; Charles F. Shinn, who brought his portable mill to section 31 in 1870. The depot trade's labor is the same size: one agent-dealer (William C. Smith, from 1863) and one livestock dealer (A. Newsbaum, 1884). That is who the record names: proprietor-families from New York and the older states, working their own mills with family labor, on a township of farm families whose sons are the only workforce pool any source implies. In what numbers, the record does not say: no hands count, wage figure or crew size for any Osceola works stands in either county history or either gazetteer census, and the federal instrument the register names — the 1880 Census of Manufactures — was published at county size, not township size, so it cannot be cut to this ground. The numbers question therefore stands open inside a dug article, with its settler named: the manuscript schedules of the 1880 Census of Manufactures for St. Joseph County (the products-of-industry schedules behind the published county tables), read establishment by establishment for the Penn mills.

Sources: Chapman (1880), pp. 789–790, 802, 823, 834, 837; Goodspeed (1893), Bancroft memoirs; 1875 atlas patrons' directory — all and Businesses. U.S.