Main Street: the plat's spine, and a state road's north leg

1833–PRESENT · THE MAIN STREET THE LINCOLNWAY IS NOT

Mishawaka's main street is Main Street: The survey of the 1913 Lincoln Highway through the county states it as a correction to the natural assumption — Lincolnway through Mishawaka is "a significant road through town, but it's not the main street. That duty falls to the unsurprisingly named Main Street, which intersects the Lincoln Highway here." Main Street is the 1830s plat's own north–south spine: the 1875 county atlas puts some of the town's first houses on it — Yerrington, Hurd's bookkeeper, "built one on Main street" in the settlement's first season — and the downtown grid it anchors, Main, Mill, Church, Spring and the numbered streets, is in this build's Neighborhoods record "the 1830s paper still in daily use, the least renamed map in the city." The street's corridor course runs from McKinley Avenue at the north — the junction where old SR 331 ended at US 20 — south through the downtown crossing with Lincolnway, and on to the river: the crossing place itself. The bridges whole belong to this build's Parks and River section; the corridors' crossings are stated here once, at pointer: the Main Street line has carried the river crossing since the first bridge of 1837, built at a cost of $2,499 by popular subscription on the site of the 1834 ferry, succeeded by the red covered bridge (1846 in the marker record, 1847 in De Kever's), the iron truss of 1874, and the present concrete bridge (1907 in the marker record, completed 1908 in De Kever's) — the one-year conflicts standing as this build prints them in Transit and Parks and River both. The second corridor crossing is Capital Avenue's, of 1986, in the entry above.

The street as a numbered road: Main Street's highway era is State Road 331's. The number came up Main Street from the south by the 1933 map's logic and, by 1953, ran the street's whole length to US 20 at McKinley — the route record's statement of old 331's end, and SR 933's junction note preserves the street's designation in the past tense: Main Street, "Old SR 331." When the number moved east to Capital Avenue in the late 1990s, Main Street kept the crossing and lost the shield; its junction with SR 933 downtown is today a city street crossing a state road, signed with the old designation in parentheses in the route record. The downtown the street serves is this build's Malls and Businesses records — the store street at Main and Lincolnway, the brewery block, the Hotel Mishawaka a block from the Milburn — carried there whole and at anchor here: Main Street's corridor fact is that for the city's first century and a half, every road in this section either crossed it or ended at it.

Sources:

1. Jim Grey's survey of the 1913 Lincoln Highway in St. Joseph County — the Main Street observation quoted in the entry.
2. Illustrated Atlas of St. Joseph County (Higgins, Belden & Co., 1875) — Yerrington's house on Main Street in the first season, as carried in the atlas's Mishawaka account.
3. This build's Neighborhoods section — the downtown grid as the 1830s paper still in daily use.
4. Indiana Historical Bureau marker 71.1968.2, "First Bridge," and De Kever's Mishawaka: A History, as carried in this build's Transit section — the 1834 ferry, the subscription bridge of 1837 at $2,499, and the successor bridges with their one-year conflicts, printed there and in Parks and River whole.
5. The route records for SR 331 and SR 933 — Main Street as old SR 331's north leg to US 20 at McKinley, and the "Old SR 331" naming at the SR 933 junction.