The private bankers — Judson A. B. & Son, and Clark & Whitson

1868 – 1902

How they were missed: they held no charter, so they stand in no official list. The businesses & banks pass searched the charter record — the OCC list, the Federal Reserve rosters, the FDIC file — and printed its finding honestly: no operating Mishawaka bank before the First National's charter of 1900–01 was documented, the 1854 Bank of Mishawaka having never opened. The finding was true of the record searched. It was the wrong record for the question.

The directory record: The Business Directory of St. Joseph County for 1868 prints a Bankers heading for Mishawaka with one house under it: Judson A. B. & Son, at Second and Main. The Judsons were the town's merchant princes — the same directory carries A. B. Judson & Son as general storekeepers, boot and shoe dealers, hat and cap dealers, and leather dealers, and A. B. Judson & Co. as proprietors of the Mishawaka Flouring Mill at the foot of Mill Street — and banking stood in their list as one line of a general house's business, which is exactly what private banking was. A generation later, Johnson's Business & Professional Directory of 1902–03 lists Clark & Whitson, bankers, at 104 E. 2d — a house that stands in the 1868 directory as a general store at the corner of Main and Second, grown by 1902 into the town's bankers. In the same 1902–03 volume the new First National Bank also stands: the private house and the chartered house side by side in one directory, the old layer not yet displaced by the new. When Clark & Whitson closed, and whether the First National absorbed its business, the record reached does not say; the settling sources are the South Bend Tribune's business pages and the county histories' banking notices, and the gap is named in this section's closing article rather than filled.

Sources:

1. Business Directory of St. Joseph County (1868), the Mishawaka list — the Bankers heading (Judson A. B. & Son, Second and Main); the same house under General Stores, Boots and Shoes, Hats and Caps, and Leather and Findings; A. B. Judson & Co., proprietors, Mishawaka Flouring Mill; Clark & Whitson under General Stores, corner Main and Second. Read in the Genealogy Trails transcription.
2. Johnson's Business & Professional Directory (1902–03), the Mishawaka Business Directory — "Clark & Whitson, bankers, 104 E 2d"; the First National Bank listed in the same department.