Miller-Knoblock and Knoblock-Heidman — wagons, then magnetos

1890 – the 1920s

The sprinkler wagons: William H. Miller came up through the planing-mill trade — Defrees & Miller, then Miller & Marsh, then William H. Miller & Co., his father joining in 1873 — and through a street-sprinkling contract at St. Louis that made his name on an improved sprinkler wagon. He returned to South Bend in 1880, and in 1889 joined with John C. Knoblock and Knoblock's son Otto. On 23 July 1890 the Miller-Knoblock Wagon Company was organized — the fourth organizer was Frederick C. Bowman — with shops on South High Street at Wenger Avenue. The company built heavy utility wagons and sprinkling wagons: it built the heaviest known wagon for carrying cables for the Cleveland City Cable Railway, and it exhibited two sprinkling wagons and two beer wagons at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. By 1899 the shops had electric power and lights. Bowman left in 1892 for Studebaker's sprinkler department. The company's High Street shops are remembered in the Businesses record as a building — the South Bend Bait Company's home from about 1920; the wagon company itself is not profiled there, and its record stands here.

The electric turn: In 1900 the firm was reorganized as the Miller-Knoblock Electric Manufacturing Company — Howard dates the organization 17 May 1900, capital $125,000, the incorporators John C. Knoblock, Otto M. Knoblock, William H. Miller, Horace G. Miller, Albert W. Morrell, and C. Warren Sheets. The reorganized company is believed, on the published account of these firms, to have sold the sprinkling-wagon business to Studebaker; what it made in the same buildings was electric magnetos. One source reports a Miller-Knoblock magneto in the Wright brothers' first airplane engine; the report is printed as a report, at the strength its single source gives it. George Heideman, who came out of Chicago's telephone-equipment trade, arrived in 1903, and on 14 October 1904 the company was reorganized again as the Knoblock-Heideman Manufacturing Company.

The end of the line: John C. Knoblock died in 1906 and Miller in 1909. About 1909 the works moved to the 800 block of East Sample Street. Heideman's flywheel magneto, dated to about 1912 in his obituary, was widely used on outboard motors. Otto Knoblock was in Chicago in the years about 1918 to 1921; Heideman went to Studebaker as foreman and superintendent for six years, and then into insurance. The Quick Action Ignition Company bought out Knoblock-Heideman — the published account does not date the purchase, and it stands in an early-1920s context — and Quick Action later tied to the Johnson Motor Wheel Company, which became Johnson Motors, the marine-engine maker. The Knoblock name runs through this whole corner of the record: the same family stands behind the furniture and undertaking house of the 1883 directory, the chilled-plow works of the entry above, and a flour-milling firm, Knoblock, Ginz & Co., that the directory lists on Hydraulic Avenue.

Sources:

1. "Evolving with the Times," a published account of the Miller-Knoblock and Knoblock-Heidman companies preserved in the Crockett family record, St. Joseph County genealogical site — Miller's planing-mill firms and St. Louis contract, the 1889 association and the 1890 organization, the Cleveland cable wagon and the 1893 exposition, the 1900 and 1904 reorganizations, the reported Wright-engine magneto, the deaths of 1906 and 1909, the Sample Street move, the flywheel magneto, and the Quick Action purchase, with the account's own hedges preserved in this entry.
2. Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, Vol. 1 (1907), manufactures chapter, sec. 8 — the Miller-Knoblock Electric Manufacturing Company organized 17 May 1900, capital $125,000, and its six incorporators.
3. Farr's South Bend City Directory for 1883, Classified Business Directory — Knoblock, Ginz & Co., flouring mills, Hydraulic Ave.