The second rank, in brief — and the gaps this record names

1852 – the present

The wagon shops beside the giant: The Winkler brothers — three brothers who began at the anvil and bench — incorporated on 29 October 1902, with $75,000 capital, as the Winkler Brothers' Manufacturing Company; in 1919 Vincent Bendix bought their works, as the Winkler-Grimm Wagon Company, and the wagon shop became the seed plant of the brake empire. The brothers' individual names are not carried in the record reached for this history. E. G. Knoblock's wagon works on South High Street, carried on as the Miller-Knoblock Wagon Company, survives as the building the Bait Company later filled. Christopher Muessel began brewing in South Bend in 1852 and built one of the city's substantial nineteenth-century industries; the Muessel Brewing Company was incorporated in 1893, and the brewery record whole — Muessel, Drewry's, and the South Bend Brewing Association of 1903, organized by the city's German, Polish and Hungarian saloon keepers against the national brands' price war — is the Food section's, pointed to here.

The boundary founders: The Wilson Brothers menswear business was founded in Cincinnati in 1864 by the four brothers John, E. Crane, Hugh, and Milton Wilson, and moved its headquarters to Chicago four years later; South Bend's part — the shirt factory of 1883, planted on land bought from J. D. Oliver in 1887 on the recorded condition that within ten years it would employ 1,000 women — was a branch founding, and the brothers stand here at boundary size. AM General, headquartered in South Bend from 1986, has been held by a succession of owners — LTV, the Renco Group, MacAndrews & Forbes, KPS Capital Partners from July 2020 — and the record reached for this history names the owners, not a South Bend chief executive of the company's own; its production is Mishawaka's and printed there as a boundary.

The gaps, named: Three silences in the founder record are printed rather than filled. The Businesses record reached for this history names no Black founder of a documented South Bend enterprise; the community's economic record stands in the Black History section, and the absence here is the record's, stated at its size. The women who founded stand in this section where the record carries them — Wilma Veldman as Tire Rack's co-founder, Ernestine Raclin as a bank's chairman and a founding member of two institutions, the six women who signed the teachers' credit union's charter in 1931 — and the garment trades' thousands of women workers were employees of men's companies in every account the record reached, which is itself a fact of the record. And the Stephenson brothers, the Robertson brother bought out in 1910, the Winkler brothers, and Singer's Leighton Pine carry no fuller individual record than the one printed above: for most of the men who founded South Bend's second rank of companies, the founding act is nearly the whole of the documented life, and this section has printed it at that size rather than invent the rest.

Sources:

1. Businesses — "The wagon era beside Studebaker" (the Winkler Brothers incorporation of 29 October 1902 and the 1919 Bendix purchase; the Miller-Knoblock works and E. G. Knoblock); "The breweries, as businesses — a cross-reference" (Christopher Muessel from 1852; the 1893 incorporation; the Brewing Association of 1903); "Wilson Brothers" (the four brothers and the 1864 Cincinnati founding; the 1883 South Bend manufacturing; the 1887 land purchase from J. D. Oliver and the 1,000-women condition); "AM General" (the headquarters from 1986; the ownership succession to KPS Capital Partners, July 2020; production as Mishawaka's boundary).
2. Bars & Nightclubs — the South Bend Brewing Association of 1903 as an organization of the city's German, Polish and Hungarian saloon keepers (The History Museum's account), cross-referenced.