The towns the city absorbed: four plats, a furnace village, and the ground that came in after

1833 – 1927

Mishawaka is itself an absorbed-towns story: the neighborhoods file carries the plats whole, and what belongs here is their life as communities. The first was a company community in the strict sense: the village of St. Joseph Iron Works, platted in the summer of 1833 around Alanson Hurd's blast furnace, its first population — about a hundred residents in 1834 — mostly workers and their families, and the first incorporated village in St. Joseph County, incorporated 31 January 1835 with a population Howard's county history gives as 328. East of it stood Barbee Town, the merchant's plat that first carried the name Mishawaka; across the river, the rival paper city of Indiana City and Fowler's village. The union was legislative, not organic: on 17 February 1838 the General Assembly's act changed the names of St. Joseph Iron Works and Indiana City alike to Mishawaka and gathered all the lots on either side of the river "at the head of the Mishawaka rapids" into one town — a community made by statute out of four, with a combined population Howard gives as 756. The absorbed towns did not vanish; they became the town's working geography, their division names — the original plat, Barbee's Addition, Taylor's, Lawrence & Battell's, Fowler's — still in use in Howard's 1907 history, and the north bank's failed capital keeping the city's cemeteries and its bluff park.

The absorptions after the union came by annexation, and two of them gathered in whole communities. The Great Annexation of January 1905 brought in the West End — Belgian Town entire, parish, bakery and clubs — two years after St. Bavo's founding had already made the ground a community outside the city that annexed it. In 1927 the city annexed its tract eastward and purchased Twin Branch School from Penn Township in the same course, gathering the power plant's neighborhood, whose own article follows. The reverse case is a boundary entry: River Park, the town between the cities that Mishawaka tried to annex and lost, is carried in the neighborhoods file at anchor and stands today as South Bend's — the one absorption Mishawaka attempted and did not make. The later Penn Township annexations that rounded the modern city are acts of the government file, cross-referenced there; the community-shaped ones are these.

Sources

1. Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), vol. 1 — the four plats, the union act of 17 February 1838 (Local Laws 1837–38, p. 410), St. Joseph Iron Works incorporated 1835 at 328, the united towns at 756.
2. Neighborhoods file of this record — the four plats and the two banks whole; the Great Annexation of January 1905; the River Park boundary.
3. History of Twin Branch Elementary School (School City of Mishawaka) — the 1927 eastward annexation and the city's purchase of Twin Branch School from Penn Township.