The first field of the name: Mishawaka Airport, 1934

1934 — LAST SEEN MAY 1948 · A COMMERCIAL FIELD ON TOWNSHIP GROUND

The opening: Labor Day 1934 — Monday, 3 September — marked the beginning of another airport in St. Joseph County: at Dragoon Trail and Elm Road, the opening ceremonies of Mishawaka Airport included an air parade and parachute jumps. So the one narrative source reached for the field, Richard Simpson's aviation history of the two cities, drawing on the South Bend Tribune's coverage; the Tribune items themselves have not yet been read first-hand, and everything in this entry stands at that strength until they are. No founder, operator, company, or opening-day sponsor for the field is named in any source reached — the record's first fact about Mishawaka Airport is its dedication show, and its second is its federal description.

The federal listing: In January 1935 the field was listed in the federal bulletin, and the entry survives verbatim as the Tribune of 29 January 1935 reprinted it: "Mishawaka – Mishawaka airport, commercial rating. Three and seven-tenths miles southeast of town on Elm road. Altitude, 700 feet. Rectangular, 3,960 by 1,320 feet, sod, level, natural drainage, entire field available. Houses and trees to southwest; wood to north; hangar in southeast corner. Facilities for servicing aircraft, day only." Three facts in that paragraph govern the field's place in this build. Its rating was commercial — a private venture open to the public, in pointed contrast to the same era's federal description of South Bend's first airport as municipal and city-owned. Its distance is measured from the town — three and seven-tenths miles southeast of it, on Penn Township ground south of the city — so the first field to carry Mishawaka's name stood outside Mishawaka, the pattern this whole section follows. And its plant was one hangar and a sod rectangle of about 120 acres of landing area: a real airport of its decade, at sod-field size.

The course and the end: Between the January 1935 listing and May 1948, the sources reached contain nothing — no wartime use, no training contract, no operator change, no expansion — a fourteen-year hole in the record, printed as a hole and not as a quiet decade proven. The last reference Simpson found to the field comes in May 1948, when part of the hangar was destroyed in a storm; that is a last-seen reference, not a documented closure, and no closure date, demolition, or land disposition is reached. His one further paragraph is inference and is printed as his, naming nobody: that the old facility did not last long after the personal problems of one of its owners, part owner of a flying service at Cadet Field and part owner of the Mishawaka Airport, whose company's assets were advertised in the Tribune classifieds as a "business opportunity" shortly after the problem was resolved. The ground today — the Dragoon Trail and Elm Road corner, postal 46544 — is rural-residential and farm ground in the present address record, and no source reached claims an airfield remnant on it. One conflation is barred in the open: an old barn at that corner, carried in a Tribune index as possibly 160 years old and lately a gallery, predates the airport by generations and is not identified as its hangar by anything reached; the 1935 description puts the hangar in the field's southeast corner, and the barn is not promoted to it here. The settling sources for the field's founding and course are the Tribune of September 1934 and 29 January 1935, the 1944 AAF Airport Directory's Mishawaka page, and the Bureau of Air Commerce's Airway Bulletin No. 2 and its successor directories, 1935–45.

Sources:

1. Richard M. Simpson III, "Aviation Around South Bend/Mishawaka," Indiana Transportation History (intransporthistory.home.blog), 12 November 2019 — the Labor Day 1934 opening with air parade and parachute jumps; the May 1948 last-seen reference and storm damage; the owner's-problems paragraph, printed as the author's inference.
2. South Bend Tribune, 29 January 1935, as quoted in the same account — the January 1935 federal listing verbatim ("commercial rating… 3,960 by 1,320 feet, sod"). The bulletin behind it: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Air Commerce, Descriptions of Airports and Landing Fields in the United States, Airway Bulletin No. 2 — the series confirmed by catalog record; its Mishawaka page not yet read first-hand.
3. Paul Freeman, "Abandoned & Little-Known Airfields: Northern Indiana" (airfields-freeman.com), searched whole — no entry for this field; the standard airfield record does not carry it.
4. Present address record for Dragoon Trail at Elm Road (13998 and 14016/14017 Dragoon Trail; 59199 Elm Road) — rural-residential ground; and the Mary Beth Reilly Tribune index entry for the corner barn, printed to bar the conflation.