The Bank of Mishawaka — the bank that never opened

Organized 1854; never opened

Paper only: The first bank in Mishawaka's record is a bank that never did any banking. Under Indiana's free-banking law of the 1850s, a Bank of Mishawaka was organized and its notes were engraved and printed by the American Bank Note Company — and there the course stops. The numismatic record, as the National Numismatic Collection's proof-note documentation and Heritage Auctions' offering of the bank's proofs carry it, states the case in one sentence: "The Bank of Mishawaka was a planned Free Bank that never opened." Its notes were unknown to collectors until the American Bank Note Company's archive holdings were dispersed; what survives is proof impressions, among them a $2 proof dated 1 August 1854 (Wolka 1620-04 in the Indiana obsolete-currency census). No depositor ever drew on it, no loan was ever made from it, and the city's banking history proper begins half a century later. It is printed at this size because the negative is the fact: Mishawaka was an industrial village of consequence for two generations — iron works, woolen mill, breweries, pulley works — before it had a working bank of its own, and the 1854 paper bank is the whole of the record before the national charter. No operating state bank, private banking house, or savings institution in Mishawaka before 1901 was documented in the record reached; the bankers' directories of the 1870s and the 1907 county history's banking chapter are the settling sources named for that silence, and it stands as a searched gap, not a settled one.

Sources:

1. Heritage Auctions and the Newman Numismatic Portal, the Bank of Mishawaka proof-note record — the bank "a planned Free Bank that never opened," its notes unknown until the ABNCo Archives dispersal; the $2 proof dated 1 August 1854, Wolka 1620-04.