Mishawaka's Communities: The Peoples Who Made the Town, and What Remains of Them

Communities · The Peoples Who Made the Town, and What Remains of Them

Mishawaka was built by communities before it was built by industries. A Potawatomi village ground at the rapids became, in five years of paper towns, a Yankee iron village whose first church was shared by Irish and German Catholics; a German Lutheran congregation organized in 1847 still worships in the city it helped found. The factory age layered new peoples over that frame: Flemish Belgians who built a city within the city in the West End, complete with its own parish, bakery, bank and bowling club; Calabrian Italians who kept two clubhouses and two sides of town; Carpathian Greek Catholics who planted an Eastern-rite parish in 1916 and, having left the Catholic Church once, came back to it. Other peoples the town's own spine names — Polish, Hungarian, Mexican — left records of very different weights, and this section prints each at the size the record actually gives: whole where the record is whole, thin where it is thin, and as a named gap where the sources reached cannot yet carry the story. The counts are the census's and the counters' own, labeled by who counted and when.

The rule of the file is the rule of the build: a community is claimed for Mishawaka only where the record seats it in Mishawaka. The valley's shared institutions — the Polish parishes, the Latino center, the Greek church, the tribal nation's casino ground — stand across the city line in South Bend, and they are printed here as boundaries, at boundary size, because Mishawaka's people used them without Mishawaka owning them.