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c. 1837–1858
The early county's celebrated offenses were not Mishawaka's, and this entry exists to say so on the record, because the lore of a rough river-and-furnace town invites the assumption. The county's first counterfeiting, as Chapman preserves it, sat in Centre Township, south of South Bend, about 1837: old James Odle, who kept a sign for "cakes and beer" over his door on a farm later occupied by James Dice, drew the suspicions of a neighbor, M. Stover, by the well-dressed men hanging about the place. The officers found the dies and press for making bogus dollars, a quantity of copper, and fifteen pounds of arsenic. Odle turned state's evidence and showed the grand jury the whole process — some 250 blanks buried under a tree, the metal "nothing but copper melted in the crucible and whitened with the arsenic" — and the jurors each kept a piece, Chapman says, "as a memento of the first counterfeiting in this county." The rest of the ring — Odle's son-in-law Foskit, Van Amburgh, Cumnius, Dixon, Clark, and others — boasted they would stay in the old log jail no longer than suited them and escaped in broad daylight; all got away except Van Amburgh, too feeble to travel fast, and he was never tried, "on account of some informality in the indictment." The scene, the jail, and the court were the county seat's; the offense was Centre Township's. No counterfeiting ring is documented to Mishawaka ground in the record reached.
The county's famous answer to horse theft sat at the county's other end. The Terre Coupee Anti-Horse-Thief Association, organized in 1853 or 1854 on the prairie of that name, agreed to recover a member's stolen horse or indemnify him; reorganized on the mutual-insurance plan when its charter expired, it paid two-thirds of value thirty days after a failed search. In twenty-five years, Chapman records, fewer than thirty horses were stolen within its jurisdiction and all but two recovered; its 120 members' "riders" were authorized by state law to act as constables. Its territory by 1880 was confined to Olive and Wills townships in this county and Hudson Township in La Porte County — the western townships. Penn Township and Mishawaka had no such association in the record, and no Mishawaka horse-thief ring stands in the histories either.
What is left for the furnace town's own first decades is the ordinary docket the histories do not bother to narrate: debts, assaults, ordinance cases before the justices, and the discipline of a company-era village. Chapman's Mishawaka chapter, read first-hand for this entry, is a record of furnaces, plats, churches, and newspapers, not of crime. The silence is itself the finding, and it ends abruptly in 1858, with the county's first murder indictment — for a killing in Mishawaka.
Sources:
- Chas. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), "A Counterfeiting Reminiscence," pp. 536–538 — read first-hand
- Chas. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), "Anti-Horse-Thief Association" (New Carlisle and Olive Township section) — read first-hand
- Chas. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), Mishawaka chapter — read first-hand