The first tenants of the power

1844–1880

The first things the races drove were saws and millstones: Chapman names the Manufacturing Company's first customers in order. Abram R. and John H. Harper — the company's own treasurer and his brother — built the first saw-mill on the race. The second use of the power was also a saw-mill, William Stanfield's, still running successfully in 1880 under E. P. Taylor. Finley & Brown came next with a tub-and-bucket factory, which burned just after getting into operation and was never rebuilt — the first entry in this city's long ledger of factory fires. The first grist-mill on the power was the Harpers' as well, known by 1880 as the Keedy Mill and owned by the Phoenix Milling Company of Landon, Corbin & Foote. An early woolen mill rose on the ground the Variety Bracket Works later occupied, and failed.

"Other factories sprung up one after another," Chapman writes, "and lined both the east and west race" — and the east race in particular collected the water trades: the first paper manufactured in South Bend was made at an East Race mill, the works that passed from Beach & Keedy to E. S. Reynolds and, by 1907, to the LaSalle Paper Company, as Howard's history records it. On the same race in 1863 the A. C. Staley Woolen Mill was established, drawing its power, the National Register documentation notes, from a flume between the two watercourses — the race and the river itself. The pattern of the generation is visible in the list: saw, grind, full, and pulp — the processing of the countryside's timber, grain, wool and rags, at the scale the fall allowed. What the races could not yet do was make a factory district by themselves. That waited on the second tenant class, the machine and implement works, and on a second network laid over the first: the railroads.

Sources:

1. Chapman, History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), "Utilizing the Water-Power," pp. 872 — the Harper and Stanfield saw-mills, the Finley & Brown tub-and-bucket factory and its burning, the Harper grist-mill become the Keedy Mill, and the failed woolen mill.
2. National Register of Historic Places, East Bank Multiple Property Documentation Form (1997/1999), citing Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), p. 408 — the first paper made in South Bend at the East Race mill, Beach & Keedy to E. S. Reynolds to the LaSalle Paper Company; and the Staley mill's flume between the race and the river.
3. This build's Businesses section — the Staley Woolen Mill's establishment on the East Race in 1863, cross-referenced.