Flour first: the milling ground the food industry started on

1830s — 1900s · the two races

The first food industry was flour: South Bend's factories began with the river's fall, and the first manufactures on the race power were food manufactures. The Harper brothers' gristmill was the first gristmill on the race power — known by 1880 as the Keedy Mill and owned by the Phoenix Milling Company of Landon, Corbin & Foote, as the Industrial Revolution section records from the county histories. Knoblock Mills stands among the East Bank's nine plants on the Sanborn map of 1885. The milling story as an industrial system — the races, the power, the fires — is Industrial Revolution's; what it establishes for this section is the shape of the city's food economy at its start: grain in, flour out, and no second food industry of scale behind it.

The packing negative, stated once: Fort Wayne built a packing industry; South Bend, in the record reached for this section, did not. No South Bend packinghouse of consequence appears in the industrial or business record assembled for this history — the city's food manufacturing ran to flour, and later to candy, while its meat trade stayed at the scale of the market house and the smokehouse, in the next entry. The one packing name that touches the city touches it lightly: Peter Eckrich, whose firm became Fort Wayne's, kept a South Bend store early in his career, as a biographical sketch carried by the Allen County genealogical society records it. That is Fort Wayne's record, pointed to here and not retold; South Bend's own meat record is the sausage houses'.

Sources:

1. Industrial Revolution section of this history, from the county histories of Chapman and Howard — the Harpers' gristmill as the first on the race power, the Keedy Mill, the Phoenix Milling Company of Landon, Corbin & Foote; Knoblock Mills among the East Bank's nine plants on the 1885 Sanborn map.
2. Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana / GermanLife biographical sketch of Peter Eckrich — the early South Bend store, printed here at one line as the sketch gives it.