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1950–1970
The turn, when it came, is documented in a church history and a school survey: in 1954, when the farm parish at St. Joseph's sought permission to build on Fir Road, the five-acre site was donated by Kenneth Zook of Zook Realty of Elkhart — because, the parish's own history records, Zook Realty was planning 270 new homes within the parish boundaries. A realty firm's plat book, filed in a parish archive, is the first hard number of the suburban era: the farms were being read as lots by the men who would sell them. The school record confirms the curve. The Ball State Teachers College survey commissioned by the new Penn-Harris-Madison corporation found that the population of the corporation's ground — Penn, Harris, and Madison townships together, the district frame, not the CDP — had reached 18,188 in 1960 and had trebled since 1930, with enrollment of 4,300 in 1959 projected to pass 5,450 by 1966. The trustee's summary of the decades is shorter and covers the same ground: "Rapid growth started when subdivisions replaced corn fields." The roads did the rest — the place sat east of South Bend in the direct path of Mishawaka's eastward growth, on the State Road 23 corridor running north toward the Michigan line — and by the 1970s the township that had held 481 people in 1900 was platting the subdivisions the census entries below count.
Sources:
- Saint Pius X Parish, parish history (the Zook Realty gift of the Fir Road site, 1954, and the 270 planned homes), read first-hand from the parish's published history.
- Ball State Teachers College, A Cooperative Study of Organizational, Building, and Financial Needs of Penn-Harris-Madison School Corporation, November 25, 1963, and the April 22, 1964 follow-on — the corporation's own commissioned survey (district ground, labeled as such).
- Lindsay, Granger Gazette, August 2020.