Mishawaka Architecture: The Built City

Architecture · The Built City

Mishawaka's built record is small enough to hold whole and old enough to matter. Eleven properties inside the city stand on the National Register of Historic Places today — five houses, a brewery, a library, a fire station, a park, a postwar subdivision and a parish square — with one more standing just outside the line in Penn Township, on ground the city owns, and one more struck from the Register after the wreckers took it. Behind the listings stands a fuller fabric: two Greek Revival houses from the town's first decade, a Queen Anne saved by a congregational vote, a limestone mansion that burned to its walls and was raised again, a Gothic parish church whose spire the diocesan history measured at 163 feet, a fire station built to look like a house, 315 veterans' houses built to seven designs, and a demolition ledger that runs from the Great Fire of 1872 to the implosion watched by six thousand people in June 2000. This chapter is that record — the buildings as buildings, each at the size the documents carry it.

The documents are unusually local. Mishawaka completed an inventory of its historic sites and structures on 29 August 1979, among the first Indiana cities to finish one, and the nominations that followed were substantially written by the city's own preservationists: an architectural firm that saved a threatened house by buying it and then wrote three of the house nominations from inside it, a preservation corporation that appears in this record again and again — holding the mansion, the library's easements, the moved WPA house — and a historian whose photographic archive of the east side's houses rests in the public library's Heritage Room. The Register's Mishawaka is, to a degree few cities can match, Mishawaka's own account of itself, filed with the state. This chapter follows it, and prints its seams where it has them.

The banked architecture fragment carries the city's mansion stock through its two National Register houses — the Dodge House and the Beiger House, both whole there and pointed to here, not retold. One great house of the checklist stood only at mention size, in the parks, clubs, and wealth records: the house the golf course's donor built himself on the bluff he kept. It is carried here at full article size.