The first public objects: a soldiers' monument and a princess's boulder

1884 · 1932 · the monument era, at anchor size

The ledger opens in Battell Park: The city's first public artwork is the Soldiers' Monument of 1884 — white bronze, thirty-two feet, $1,460 — raised by the subscription generation that built the park itself. The object's fabric and restorations stand in Architecture and the park's course in Parks & River; what belongs here is its place in the ledger: for its first half-century it is effectively the whole of Mishawaka's commissioned public art, a veterans' memorial standing alone in the record where a later city would have a program.

The second object is a monument to a fiction: In Lincoln Park stands the boulder and bronze plaque the Daughters of the American Revolution set in 1932, before a thousand people, at the supposed grave of Princess Mishawaka. The princess is fiction — the Story of Mishawaka section and Folklore records settle her 1875 storybook origin and carry the tablet's text entire — and Heritage carries the marker course. As public art the object is carried here at anchor: a boulder and a bronze plaque for a woman who never lived, dedicated with ceremony in the centennial year and maintained as a monument since — the ledger's strangest entry, and the proof that Mishawaka was commissioning commemorative objects in bronze half a century before it commissioned anything else. Folklore owns the legend; this section owns only the fact that the city put it in bronze.

Sources:

1. This build's Architecture section — the Soldiers' Monument of 1884 (white bronze, thirty-two feet, $1,460) in Battell Park, and the 1932 boulder and plaque as objects, cross-referenced.
2. This build's Folklore section — the Princess Mishawaka monument tablet, Lincoln Park (erected 1932; statue on a native boulder by the Mishawaka Chapter D.A.R., tablet by the Lions Club), its inscription transcribed entire from the Historical Marker Database (photographed 21 May 2024).
3. This build's Heritage section — the marker program and the 1932 dedication's course.