Little Shoemaker Welding Plays a Big Role
Published: Friday, December 25, 2020
In and around Shoemaker Welding, Mark Shearer is affectionately known as "the Wizard."
The magic he performs—often with tools and equipment in use since the turn of the 20th century, if not before—make him a treasured asset to the regional farming community and help burnish Shoemaker's national reputation for producing must-have farm drainage pumps.
If not for pumps and tile systems moving countless gallons of groundwater, some consistently and others on an as-needed basis, a good portion of the exceptionally fertile farmland in the Kankakee River Basin would be unworkable before and during much of the growing season.
The heart of each Shoemaker pump is an impeller created by Shearer in the unassuming St. Joseph County workshop set back a little from S.R. 23, appropriately enough, on the north bank of the Kankakee.
"I've made every one for the last 40 years," Shearer said matter-of-factly on a recent morning. "Probably a couple thousand. I guess the main thing is that we've got a lot of people who aren't just customers, they're friends.
"There's people I've done work for 40-some years and it's been neat watching things develop from, gosh, a four-row combine to 16-row."
While Shearer doesn't have a hint of a Moses Complex, he does have a hand in separating water from land throughout Indiana and several other states, according to Shoemaker Welding General Manager Riley Maenhout. The company's pumps are used to move water in and out of cranberry operations in Wisconsin and to drain peat bogs in Florida.
One local farmer even had Shoemaker pumps sent to his operation in Africa, and many land-owners use Shoemaker pumps to flood fields soon after harvest for duck hunting, Maenhout said.
An impeller, which resembles a boat-motor propeller, spins inside the pump to move 1,000 to 15,000 gallons of water a minute. Shoemaker workers primarily make 8-, 10-, 12-, 14-, 18-, 24- and 30-inch pumps.
Loy D. Shoemaker started the company 1945 and sold it to his son, Alan, in the early 1970s. When Alan died on May 11, his son David became the third-generation owner. David Shoemaker, however, lives in China where he is a world-renowned sommelier and the global director of hotels for Shanghai-based Treasury Wine Estates, one of the world's largest wine companies.
Maenhout, who has been with the company for 15 years, runs the daily operation.
"There's a lot of little stuff we do, welding and a lot of repairs," Maenhout said. "Pretty much every farmer in the area brings something in here and hands it off, and we hand it back to them like new or better. I'd say 75 percent of our business is ag-related from fabricating stuff to fixing stuff.
"And, we drain a lot of farm ground."
Shoemaker's is a place where a bygone era has merged with the space age.
A supplier uses a laser to cut the 7-guage (three-sixteenths-inch thick), square steel plates Shearer transforms into impellers, but he heats them up in a coal-fired forge that came from a blacksmith shop where the smithy likely made horseshoes and chains. Shearer relies on well-worn forge tongs of undetermined age, but were no doubt the tools of an old-fashioned artisan.
The company's Lodge & Shipley lathe, which was made in Cincinnati and is used on every pump Shoemaker's builds or repairs, dates back to 1902. The vertical milling machine is hooked up to a three-speed Studebaker truck transmission. Alan Shoemaker bought the Little Giant trip hammer, used to efficiently shape red-hot steel, new in 1946.
"I grew up on the farm and we used to come in here when I was a kid," said Shearer, who still makes hay on 200 acres in addition to leasing out his land. "I graduated from high school in 1972, always liked coming here, got job and have been here ever since. In the new processes they have now, they'd buy an impeller like (ours), make a mold of it, have it cast and machine it.
"I'm not saying our way is better. It's just that when you do it with a casting, you have to be high-production. There are a lot of different pump companies, but we do it the old way."
The method is validated, Maenhout said, by repeat customers spanning at least four generations.
"You wouldn't think that's the case just with this little building of ours," he said. "You can't even fit most farm equipment in here anymore, but guys say there's a reason they wouldn't go anywhere else. These pumps are just as essential as any other piece of equipment.
"If you don't have a combine, you don't pick the corn. If you don't have a pump, you can't plant the corn."
Shoemaker Welding got into the pump business around 1950 when an engineer, who had also worked on the toll road, asked Loy Shoemaker if he could make a pump for the Purdue University test farm on S.R. 4 at Osborne Road.
"That's was just an 8-inch pump," Shearer said. "Then he started making a bunch of pumps for Gumz (Farms) and then it just sort of followed the river."
All the way to the Mississippi, as it turned out. Shoemaker's recently serviced a 36-inch pump it made for a farm in Francesville, and has been in continuous operation since 1973.
"That was a special order and it pumps 40,000 gallons a minute," Shearer said.
One farm has 26 pumps going on land that was converted to agricultural use when the Grand Kankakee Marsh, known as the Everglades of the North, was drained more than 100 years ago.
A network of dikes and ditches has been built over the years to keep farmland and river system separate, but the basin area is notorious for periodic flooding.
Water from low-lying areas, much of which used to be swampland, drains into ditches and then pumped into a waterway, such as Pine Creek which connects to the Kanka-kee.
"When the water comes up, (farmers) pump it down so they can get their crops in, and then they can bring the water table right up within a foot for sub-surface irrigation," Shearer said.
Dave Sabones' father installed the first Shoemaker pump on the family's 2,000-acre corn and soybean farm in LaPorte County in 1956. There are now 13 pumps of various sizes on his land. Most automatically go on and off when needed to maintain the water level.
"If I didn't have pumps, I don't know what I'd do," said Sabones. "They're our lifeblood. There's more pumps than you'd realize out there. Almost every farm in this area has at least one someplace. They're very important on the lower ground here in northern Indiana because otherwise you probably couldn't farm it.
"We'd be under water all the time if it wasn't for these dikes."
On one side of the dike Sabones is standing on is Pine Creek—seemingly misnamed because at this point it looks more like a river than the Kankakee a few hundred yards downstream. On the other side is his cropland, which is 12 feet lower than the high-water mark and protected by a beastly 30-inch pump connected to a diesel engine.
"This one here is for the big floods," he said. "It's basically an insurance policy. The water has gone over the top of this (dike) even, and when the water is real high, it seeps through and that there ditch catches it and this pump pumps it out.
"You've gotta have 500 acres of water on top of the ground for that one to be used and when you turn it you can't even tell it's doing anything to the water level in that creek. It doesn't raise it at all. When you talk pumping water, it's all just big numbers."
Maenhout wouldn't hazard to guess how many total gallons of water have been moved by Shoemaker pumps over time.
"Calculators don't go that high," he said. "The only number that's longer is Pi."
Passersby may not give drainage pumps a second look, if they notice them at all. But, they are as much a part of farming as the more noticeable barns, grain bins, tractors and combines and why Shoemaker's feels like it's an integral part of the agricultural community.
"Just in the past few years, there's been several people who've said, word for word, 'There's a lot of people who really depend on you and don't know what we'd do if you guys weren't here,'" Maenhout said. "After Al passed away, there were a lot of guys who basically offered the shirt off their back to make sure we keep going—'If there's anything you need, call me, I'll help you out.'
"And these are guys who are farming all the time, they're busy. Where else could you go where somebody will talk to you like that?"
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