The National Register, the Surveys and Who Filed Them

1973–2026 · THE DOCUMENTED CITY

The skeleton: St. Joseph County holds 102 current National Register listings, on the National Park Service's county record complete through its postings of September 2026, with four more removed over the years. Mishawaka's share of that record is eleven listings standing inside the city, one standing in Penn Township on the city's own reservoir ground, and one removed. In the order they were listed: the Beiger House (28 August 1973), the Dodge House (8 September 1978), the Kamm and Schellinger Brewery (11 October 1979), the Eller-Hosford House (27 January 1983), the Merrifield-Cass House (16 June 1983), the Ellis-Schindler House (18 December 1990), the Battell Park Historic District (11 January 1996), the Mishawaka Carnegie Library and the Mishawaka Reservoir Caretaker's Residence together (14 August 1998), the Normain Heights Historic District (20 March 2002), the Mishawaka Fire Station No. 4 (18 September 2017), and St. Joseph's Parish Square (7 June 2022). The removed listing is the Tivoli Theater, listed 1 April 1998 and removed 24 March 2005, three weeks after its demolition; its entry stands in the demolition ledger below. The state's own database of record for all of it is SHAARD, the Indiana State Historic Architectural and Archaeological Research Database, and the individual nominations — the forms, the photographs, the preparers' own words — are the first-hand sources this chapter is built on.

The surveys: The Register record rests on survey work the city did early. The state inventory of historic sites and structures reached Mishawaka in the 1970s, and on 29 August 1979 the city completed its own inventory of historic sites and structures — "one of the first Indiana cities to complete its inventory," in the words of a city letter preserved inside the Ellis-Schindler nomination file. The letter-writer, a member of the committee that had just finished the work, recorded the hope that city officials would "become more aware of the importance of preserving our City's past" — and the listings of 1978, 1979, 1983 and 1983 that bracket the inventory's completion are its first fruits. A second city inventory followed in 1995, the Historic Sites and Structures Inventory that rated the Carnegie library Outstanding, on the showing of that building's nomination. The standing local machinery is the city's Historic Preservation Commission, also styled the Historic Review Board in the record of the Tivoli fight: it sought a developer for the theater with the preservation corporation in the 1990s and recommended the theater's interim protection by six votes to one in June 2004 — the controversies record owns that fight whole. The commission has also made local designations of its own, beyond the Register: the Petro Park Local Historic District, designated 15 May 2000 after the commission's approval of 4 April 2000, protects thirteen contributing structures and features in a west-side park built out under Roosevelt-era work relief, among them the Shanower Drive entry monuments — two six-foot fieldstone monuments flanking the Jefferson Boulevard entrance.

The loose ends of the record, printed as they stand: In 2002 the commission was reported talking of a local district along West Mishawaka Avenue, from Calhoun to Forest, without taking action, and opposing a state-bill amendment — sought at a state representative's request — that would have created a separate Lincolnway East preservation commission to protect seven houses from demolition for the Capital Avenue highway project. Both items stand in the record at that strength, as documented process: the talk, the opposition, and no outcome beyond them in the record reached. The seven houses' fate is not in the record reached either, and is named as a gap in this section's note.

The preservation corps: Three names recur across the filings. LeRoy Troyer and Associates, the Mishawaka architects who bought the Dodge House in 1977 to save it and restored it as their own office, prepared three of the house nominations from that office — the Dodge House nomination itself, written by Arlene Hunter, an architectural graduate and apprentice in the firm, in 1977; the Eller-Hosford nomination, by the firm's Philip W. Cartwright, in 1979; and the Merrifield-Cass nomination, by Phil Cartwright, AIA, in 1982 — the later two carrying the firm's address as 415 Lincolnway East, the Dodge House itself. Glory-June Greiff prepared the Reservoir Caretaker's Residence nomination of 1997 and the Normain Heights nomination of 2001. Adrian Scott Fine prepared the Battell Park nomination of 1995 and the Carnegie Library nomination of 1997. And behind the houses stands the Beiger Heritage Corporation, the preservation body that began as a division of Southhold Restorations — the South Bend restoration firm, boundary-printed here — split off in the 1970s when it acquired the Beiger mansion, held the protective easements on the Carnegie library and sued to enforce its right of first refusal there, bought the WPA caretaker's house from the city and moved it to save it, and took on the Wallace-Dodge House among its projects after selling the mansion in 1989. Its "Beiger East-Multi Site Historic District" photographic archive, printed in February 2000, is held in the Heritage Room of the Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library. The built city's paper memory is, in large part, this small corps' work.

Sources:

1. National Park Service, National Register database and weekly lists — the county's 102 current listings and four removals; the listing dates and reference numbers for every Mishawaka property named here, through the postings of 18 September 2026.
2. Nomination file, Ellis-Schindler House (1990) — the 1979 city inventory, its completion date of 29 August 1979 and the committee letter quoted.
3. Nomination, Mishawaka Carnegie Library (1997) — the 1995 Historic Sites and Structures Inventory and its Outstanding rating for the library; the libraries record of this history carries the file whole.
4. Petro Park Local Historic District designation application (Lawson-Fisher Associates, 2000) — the designation of 15 May 2000, the commission's approval of 4 April 2000, the thirteen contributing structures and features, the Shanower Drive monuments.
5. South Bend Tribune, 2002, via the Michiana Business & Research Library catalogue — the West Mishawaka Avenue district talk and the commission's opposition to the Lincolnway East amendment.
6. South Bend Tribune, 2010, via the Michiana Business & Research Library catalogue — the Beiger Heritage Corporation's course and its February 2000 photographic archive at the library.