The historians, as authors

1859–1932 · THE SHELF THAT SOURCES KEEPS

In brief. The men who first wrote this ground's history are entered as sources, with their books' standing weighed, in Sources. As authors they belong on this page in a paragraph each. The county shelf is South Bend's to shelve whole, and its Mishawaka bearing is printed here at that strength: Chas. C. Chapman & Co.'s 1880 county history — a Chicago subscription house's production — carries the first full narrative of the iron-works town, and Timothy Edward Howard's A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (Lewis Publishing Company, two volumes, 1907) carries the participant's version, its second volume's biographies thick with Mishawaka names. The town's own first historian wrote in a newspaper: George Merrifield, a pioneer who taught school in Mishawaka off and on for twenty years, published nine articles in 1859 under the title "Mishawaka: Its Early History and Present Condition" — the record's first sustained act of local history-writing, quoted still by every successor. His successor held the office in fact: Vincent Brunner (born 1862, brought from Switzerland at five, a Mishawaka resident for life) was the city's historian of the centennial generation, and for decades he gathered stories and clippings and wrote them into a manuscript, Mishawaka, Its Rise and Progress — 137 essays on the city up to its 1932 centennial. The manuscript was never published. Brunner's research, on the word of the commissioned history that succeeded him, "laid the foundation for subsequent efforts to tell the story of Mishawaka," and his injunction stands at the head of that successor's book: Mishawaka "should be a distinct and separate community with its own inspiration," and its citizens should "reverence the name Mishawaka." The unpublished book is the root of the published shelf below.

Sources:

1. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History (city-commissioned; posted by the City of Mishawaka, 2023), read first-hand — the Brunner biography and manuscript (137 essays; the "distinct and separate community" injunction), the Merrifield nine-article series of 1859 and its title, and the quotation of Merrifield on the river.
2. Sources (this record) — the county shelf: title pages and catalog records of Chapman (1880) and Howard (1907), with each book's standing from this build's reading of it.