The first houses: two hotels, one saloon outside the limits, and the temperance fight of 1834

1834 — 1880

The saloon that started the argument: Timothy Edward Howard's History of St. Joseph County (1907) opens its temperance chapter with Mishawaka: "In 1834 a similar society was organized in Mishawaka" — a temperance society, a year after the town's founding — and "in the same year there was much feeling caused in Mishawaka by the establishment of a saloon just outside the corporation limits, by one Nichols." The saloon placed beyond the town's jurisdiction is the first drinking place named in Mishawaka's record, and the feeling it caused is the first drink politics: the town's saloon fight begins not over a license but over a boundary, in 1834. Howard carries the sequel at county size — the Washingtonian movement of the early 1840s, with its mass pledge-signing, was "particularly active in South Bend and Mishawaka" — and the county's later temperance course (the Crusade of 1873–74, the W.C.T.U.) is the county's record, told in the South Bend history; Mishawaka's own named part in it is the beginning given here.

The hotels of 1836: The town's public drinking rooms of the founding years were its hotels, and one first-hand account names them. Dr. E. W. H. Ellis, arriving over the river on 7 August 1836, "made his way to the Mishawaka Hotel, kept by that prince of landlords and good fellows, Orlando Hurd," and counted the town's houses a few days later: "The hotels were the Mishawaka Hotel, already mentioned, and Kellogg's Hotel, in Barbee-town. These were filled with the new settlers and passing immigrants." Ellis also records the contention the hotels embodied, in the same breath as the town's church foundings: "A. M. Hurd was a strenuous advocate of temperance and the moralities, while the views of the hotel proprietor and his friends had a strong leaning toward what was called liberality." The ironmaster Alanson M. Hurd — founder of the works the town grew from — stood for temperance; his namesake the landlord stood for liberality; and the argument between them, printed in Chapman's county history of 1880, is the documented frame of Mishawaka's first decade of drink.

The hotel line runs on: By the gazetteers of 1880–85 the town's hotel is the Milburn House, H. A. Work proprietor, listed in both editions (the 1884 list adds a second house, taken up in the next entry). The hotel bar of the nineteenth century leaves no room-by-room record for Mishawaka — no register, no bar account was reached — and the later landmark, the Hotel Mishawaka of 1909 at Third and Main, stands in the Neighborhoods section's record (demolished May 1968 for the post office); no account of its bar or grill was reached by this section, and it is not given one here.

Sources:

1. Timothy Edward Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), ch. XIII, "Temperance and Prohibition" — the Mishawaka temperance society of 1834; Nichols's saloon just outside the corporation limits and the "much feeling" it caused; the Washingtonians "particularly active in South Bend and Mishawaka." Read first-hand (archive.org).
2. Chas. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880) — Dr. E. W. H. Ellis's account of his arrival, 7 August 1836: the Mishawaka Hotel kept by Orlando Hurd; Kellogg's Hotel in Barbee-town; A. M. Hurd "a strenuous advocate of temperance" against the hotel proprietor's "liberality." Read first-hand (archive.org).
3. R. L. Polk & Co., Indiana State Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1880-81 and 1884-85 — the Milburn House, H. A. Work proprietor, in both editions' Mishawaka listings; Neighborhoods section of this history — the Hotel Mishawaka (1909–1968).