The lumber yard — the corridor's oldest continuous trade

American Lumberman, 25 August 1928, read first-hand; Big C Lumber's own history pages; South Bend Regional Chamber, "Celebrating 100 Years" (2021)

One Roseland firm can be followed from 1928 to the present counter, and it is the lumber yard. The town code's 1927 "lumber company" was the Roseland Lumber & Supply Company, a branch yard of the Niles Lumber Company of Niles, Michigan. The lumber trade's own paper reported what happened next, from Niles, under the headline of the yard's sale: on 15 August 1928 the yard was sold to the North Side Lumber Company of Mishawaka, "one of the Hass chain of yards," the announcement made by M. S. Rudisill, secretary-treasurer of the selling company. The Hass chain had begun in 1921 when William Hass and George Bales bought the North Liberty yard; the yards were incorporated in 1926; about 1935 Hass took Bales's interests. William Hass died in 1956 and his sons Ralph and Paul, his daughter Gladys and her husband William Foley succeeded; in the 1968 division of the businesses the Foleys took the retail yards; Roger Foley took control in 1982; and in 1984 the corporate name became Big C Lumber. Today the firm runs fifteen yards from a Granger headquarters, and the Roseland yard — at 125 North Dixie Way, in the town — is, in the Chamber's words, "one of their original retail stores," recently renovated as a design and selection showroom. The firm's own timeline tells the 1928 step the other way — "Roseland, IN Yard Acquired… forming part of the Niles Lumber Company" — against the trade paper's dated report of a sale out of the Niles company into the Hass chain; the two tellings print unmerged in the pass note's register (C25), and this article follows the trade paper for the transaction and the company's own pages for everything after. What is not in dispute is the ground: a lumber yard has traded at the corridor's north end, under a chain of owners the record names at every step, for at least ninety-eight years — the longest documented business course in the town.