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WEA-7 DUG AT RECORD STRENGTH · THE FOUNDING AND THE BOND FILE
The town's durable industrial fortune is a family company's, and its two documentary anchors are a founding and a bond issue. The founding: Polygon Company, established in Walkerton in 1949 by Sam Shobert, a chemist who had worked on advanced composite materials at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base during the war and is credited as the first thermoset pultrusion manufacturer in North America; the firm grew in the family — a second generation (Jim Shobert as chief executive, Ben Shobert in marketing) leads it in the current record — into the plant that announced, in August 2026, a tenfold medical-capacity expansion. The bond: in May 1973 the South Bend Common Council's Resolution 373-73 and its Economic Development Commission processed an application from Plas/Steel Products, Inc., "an Indiana corporation, of Walkerton," for some $500,000 of economic-development revenue bonds to build and equip an expansion in Walkerton's industrial park — a project costed at about $500,000, estimated at 100 jobs and an $832,000 annual payroll increase, from a firm the commission's report calls "an established business in the county for many years," on an application dated April 26, 1973. The two anchors are printed side by side and deliberately unmerged: whether Plas/Steel — which the banked businesses record ties to an S. M. Shobert — is Polygon's ancestor, sibling, or neighbor stands open in the record (GAP-W6-9), with the Indiana Secretary of State's corporate filings for both entities named as the settler. A town of two thousand does not often hold two composites firms and a shared surname in one industrial park; the record holds all three facts and not the join, and the join is printed as the gap it is.
Principal sources: the Polygon company record (founding 1949, Sam Shobert; the industry profiles); City of South Bend, Resolution No. 373-73 and Economic Development Commission report, May 1973 (docs.southbendin.gov, read whole).