The failure test — Mishawaka against the FDIC list

The Depression course, tested 2026

The test, run the same way as Fort Wayne and South Bend: The discipline of this build is that a banking negative is printed only after the list is checked, and the check is reported with the negative. The FDIC's Failed Bank List — every insured failure since 1 October 2000 — was searched by bank name and by city for Mishawaka: no Mishawaka institution appears on it. The list's Indiana entries are four, all elsewhere: Irwin Union Bank and Trust Company of Columbus (18 September 2009), Integra Bank, National Association, of Evansville (29 July 2011), SCB Bank of Shelbyville (10 February 2012), and Kentland Federal Savings and Loan Association (10 July 2026). For the pre-FDIC decades the equivalent tests are the charter record and the survivors' roster, and both are in this section: charter No. 5167 was never placed in receivership — the First National lived to merge, as an institution with $126.9 million of deposits, in 1983 — and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago's licensed list of 30 June 1935 carries both Mishawaka banks open and licensed.

The one casualty, and what kind it was: Mishawaka's Depression banking story is therefore not a failure story. Its one casualty, the Mishawaka-St. Joseph Loan & Trust Company, was resolved on 19 September 1932 by assumption — savings depositors taken whole by South Bend's St. Joseph Loan & Trust Company, commercial depositors by the First National Bank of Mishawaka — a wind-up arranged between institutions, recorded by the Federal Reserve Board in the week it happened, of the kind that left no depositor to a receiver's dividend. Printed as the negative it is: no Mishawaka bank failed — not in the Depression on the records tested, and not since, on the FDIC's list.

Sources:

1. FDIC, Failed Bank List (failures since 1 October 2000), searched by name and city, November 2026 — no Mishawaka entry; the Indiana entries are Columbus (2009), Evansville (2011), Shelbyville (2012), and Kentland (2026).
2. Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, licensed banks list No. 21 (30 June 1935, supplements to February 1937), and the Federal Reserve Board's order of 25 March 1983 — the survivors' roster and the First National's unreceivershiped course to merger, as carried in the entries above.
3. Federal Reserve Board, mimeographed letters, week ended 7 October 1932 — the Loan & Trust assumption of 19 September 1932.