Kamm & Schellinger of Mishawaka, the region's second brewery

1850 — 1951

The boundary, printed: The nomination's frame of three breweries counts one that was never this city's: Kamm & Schellinger stood in Mishawaka, the separate city four miles east, and its full record belongs to Mishawaka's own history when that city is built. It is carried here at boundary size because its beer competed in South Bend's saloons from the 1850s, because the Muessel nomination itself uses it as the region's second term, and because a reader of this city's brewing record will meet the name and should be told plainly whose it is. The register text for the Mishawaka plant states the founding: "the Kamm & Schellinger Brewery was established in 1850 by John Wagner, who built a small brewery about one mile east of the center of Mishawaka on the banks of the St. Joseph River." The city's historic marker for the site dates the fabric slightly differently — "First structures built 1853; incorporated 1883" — and the two dates are printed together: founded 1850 in the register's account, its first surviving structures dated 1853 by the marker.

Course, at boundary size: Adolph Kamm, a German immigrant brewer, bought the small brewery in 1870 with Clemens Dick; Dick withdrew in 1880 and Nicholas Schellinger, Kamm's brother-in-law, took the partnership that gave the firm its permanent name — Kamm & Schellinger, incorporated in 1883 (the marker's date; the county-history sketch the register quotes gives the incorporation's capital as $65,000). The same sketch sizes the mature plant at "an output of about 30,000 barrels," shipped beyond its home market, under a brand the register names: Kamm & Schellinger Pilsner. Beer production at the Mishawaka plant ended in 1951 — a year after the South Bend Brewing Association's close, so that the region's two surviving historic breweries died within a year of each other — and the complex, listed on the National Register in 1979, survives in Mishawaka as the 100 Center, reused for shops, offices and apartments. There the boundary entry ends; the firm's Mishawaka record — its fires, its family, its century — is that city's to print.

Sources:

1. National Register text for the Kamm & Schellinger brewery complex, Mishawaka, as carried at historic-structures.com — John Wagner's 1850 founding; the Kamm and Dick purchase of 1870; Schellinger's succession in 1880; the quoted county-history sketch (incorporation capital $65,000; output about 30,000 barrels; the Pilsner brand); the end of beer production in 1951; and Mishawaka city historic marker for the site — first structures 1853, incorporation 1883, the brother-in-law partnership, and the survival of the complex as the 100 Center.
2. National Register nomination, Muessel/Drewry's Brewery Historic District (2000) — the three-brewery frame in which Kamm & Schellinger stands as the region's second brewery.