Wool first: the river mills and the underwear trade

1863 — the twentieth century

The city's first cloth was wool: Before South Bend sewed a shirt it fulled and wove wool. Chapman, writing in 1880, records an early woolen mill on the East Race, on ground the Variety Bracket Works later occupied, and records it in one word: it failed. The mill that lasted rose on the same race in 1863 — the A. C. Staley Woolen Mill, drawing power, the National Register documentation notes, from a flume between the race and the river. Staley wove wool first; in 1888 the works turned to the garment itself and began making men's wool underwear and overshirts, sold, the nomination records, throughout the northern half of the United States. The Stephenson brothers, who had started as the company's salesmen, became sole owners in 1907, and the firm took their name — Stephenson Underwear Mills — adding a women's underwear line sold nationwide. The firm's Building No. 6, raised in 1916 at 322 East Colfax Avenue, was built for the whole sequence of the trade under one roof: carding, spinning, sewing, cutting, and knitting. The nomination counts about 300 garment workers at the mill, most of them women. The mill's corporate course stands in the Businesses section; the point for the cloth record is that South Bend's garment industry began as a woolen mill that learned to sew what it wove. The 1909 census counts exactly one establishment in the city under "woolen, worsted, and felt goods, and wool hats" and exactly one under "hosiery and knit goods"; which of its two headings the census takers filed the East Race works under, the tables do not say, and this record does not guess.

Sources:

1. Chapman, History of St. Joseph County (1880) — the early woolen mill on the East Race and its failure, as carried in this build's Industrial Revolution section.
2. National Register of Historic Places nomination, Stephenson Underwear Mill (1995) — the A. C. Staley Woolen Mill of 1863, the 1888 turn to men's wool underwear and overshirts, the Stephenson ownership and renaming of 1907, the women's line, Building No. 6 of 1916 and its processes, and about 300 garment workers, most of them women; as carried in this build's Businesses section.
3. Thirteenth Census, Vol. IX, Table III, pp. 334–335 — the single woolen-goods and single hosiery-and-knit-goods establishments in the city's 1909 enumeration.
4. R. L. Polk & Co., South Bend City Directory (1921), classified business directory — "Underwear Manufacturers": Stephenson Underwear Mills, 302–332 E. Colfax av., the heading's only entry.