St. Joseph's Parish Square: a block held since 1861

1861–2022 · WEST THIRD, WEST FOURTH, MILL AND SPRING

The listing: The Register's most recent Mishawaka entry before this history's present is a whole city block: St. Joseph's Parish Square, bounded by West Third, West Fourth, South Mill and South Spring Streets, listed 7 June 2022 with a period of significance of 1873–1958 and architecture as its area. The parish — the mother parish of Mishawaka Catholicism, whose congregation's record stands whole in the religion record of this history — was established on the full block in the southwest corner of the commercial district in 1861 and has been based on the square since. The state preservation office's listing summary counts four buildings in the district, "each well-executed examples of architecture": the parish church, the rectory, the former convent, and the parochial school the square's resources supported. The nomination itself is a restricted Register file and was not reachable; the building-by-building dates and styles beyond the church's are named as a gap in this section's note, with the state's SHAARD database as the settling source. What follows is the square's fabric at the size the reachable record carries it.

The church: The square has carried three churches. The frame church burned in 1861; the brick church Father Koenig built at Third and Spring — dedicated 8 December 1861, about $8,000, seating about 300, on the diocesan history's account — stood where the schoolhouse later stood. The present church, at 225 South Mill Street, was dedicated on 22 October 1893. The diocesan history of 1907 describes it as it rose: Gothic in style, of white brick with limestone trimmings, its dimensions 151 by 60 feet, the ceiling fifty feet high and the spire 163 feet — figures this history prints as that history gives them. Its Last Supper window was exhibited at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 before its installation in the church in 1894, and the parish counts it one of only two consecrated churches in the diocese, on its own account, in the religion record. The 1907 diocesan history also describes the square's school as the parish then determined to build it: two stories and a basement, of brick and stone, with a self-supporting steel truss and a slate roof, 136 by 70 feet with a transept of eighty feet — the schoolhouse generation that replaced the brick church's site and the earlier school buildings of 1865, 1870 and 1876 the same history enumerates. The pastor's residence stood by then at the corner of Fourth and Spring, and the St. Agnes Convent housed the Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ, who had arrived on 25 October 1878, on Fourth Street — "opposite the church square," the diocesan history places it, while the state summary counts a former convent among the square's four buildings. Both placements stand in the record as their sources give them; this chapter does not move the convent across the street to reconcile them. It is the only parish square on the Register in the city's record, and the only Mishawaka listing whose ground has held one institution's buildings, in successive generations, for more than a century and a half.

Sources:

1. National Park Service weekly list, 10 June 2022 — St. Joseph's Parish Square, bounded by West 3rd, West 4th, South Mill and South Spring Streets, Mishawaka, reference 100007740, listed 7 June 2022.
2. Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Division of Historic Preservation and Archaeology — the listing summary: the block held since 1861, the four buildings named, the period 1873–1958, the area of significance.
3. Herman Joseph Alerding, diocesan history (1907), read first-hand in the religion pass — the 1861 church and its cost and seating, the 1893 church's style, dimensions and spire, the school as determined on, the Fourth and Spring rectory, and St. Agnes Convent opposite the square.
4. The religion record of this history — the parish whole: the 1893 dedication of 22 October, the Last Supper window's exhibition and installation, and the consecrated standing.