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Culture · The Princess City, the Power City, and the Life Between
Mishawaka has carried two names for itself, and they do not agree. One is a princess who never lived: a figure out of an 1875 storybook whom the city crowned, pageanted, marked with bronze, and finally took for its nickname, the Princess City. The other is a boast of the powerhouse age, the Power City, struck in the 1920s when the Twin Branch plant on the river made this small city a producer of electricity for a region. Underneath both names stood the culture that actually filled the city's days: a Belgian west end where Flemish was the language of home and shop and a bowling game from Flanders is still played; two Italian enclaves with their own mutual-aid halls, both halls standing a century on; a high school that took its mascot from a handmade sign in 1922 or 1923 and crowned a Princess Mishawaka of its own every year; and a calendar of public celebration — pageants, centennials, parades, band concerts — by which the city periodically told itself who it was. This section records that lived whole. The institutions that housed it — the Tivoli, the Carnegie library, the churches, the halls — are dug whole in their own legs; here they appear at the size their cultural course requires, and the course itself is the subject.
The Princess City: a fiction the city chose, and kept choosing
THE LEGEND'S CIVIC CAREER · 1909 TO THE PRESENT
The test of the tale stands in the Story of Mishawaka section: the Princess Mishawaka story originated in Flavius J. Littlejohn's 1875 collection of tales, no document of the village's time carries the princess, and the 1932…
The other name: the Power City, and the works in the street names
THE INDUSTRIAL SELF-IMAGE · THE 1920S TO THE PRESENT
Against the princess stood a second self-image, and unlike hers it was minted from fact. When the Twin Branch dam and power plant made Mishawaka the region's electricity producer — its current feeding, through the Indiana &…
Centennial Week, May 15–21, 1932: the city performs itself
ONE WEEK IN THE DEPRESSION'S WORST YEAR
The fullest single document of Mishawaka's culture is the week it staged for its hundredth birthday, in May 1932, with the national unemployment rate climbing toward the 24.9 percent it would reach the next year. The commissioned…
The sesquicentennial, 1983: the ritual, fifty years on
THE 150TH BIRTHDAY · A YEARLONG PRODUCTION
Fifty years after the centennial, the city ran the same play with new machinery. A fifteen-member Sesquicentennial Commission planned a yearlong celebration for the 150th birthday in 1983: a costume ball in University Park Mall…
The Belgian West End: a Flanders kept in Indiana
BELGIAN TOWN · 1901 TO THE PRESENT
The largest and most completely documented of Mishawaka's ethnic cultures is the Belgian one, and its scale deserves the record's own numbers first. Immigrants from East and West Flanders settled the west end — "Belgian Town,"…
The two Italian Mishawakas: DeAmicis and DiLoreto
SOUTH SIDE AND NORTH SIDE · 1900 TO THE PRESENT
The Italian community grew from eight people in 1900 to 993 by 1930, about half foreign-born and half the American-born children of Italian parents, and it built not one Mishawaka but two. The south-side community settled between…
The Germans: the founding culture that became the background
FROM THE FIRST SETTLEMENT TO THE EFFIGY'S OTHER SIDE
The German presence in Mishawaka is older than the ethnic enclaves and harder to see, for the reason that it was never only an enclave. Germans were in the town from its founding generation; the city's signature industries carry…
The Polish and Hungarian record
STATED AT TRUE SIZE · THE SETTLING SOURCES NAMED
The Story of Mishawaka section of this history names the peoples of the factory-age town in one sentence — "the Belgian and German, Polish and Italian, and later Black and Mexican Mishawaka of the factory age" — and for the…
Black Mishawaka: Medora Powell, and the record of a small community
1887 TO THE PRESENT · DOCUMENTED IN PERSONS AND IN EXCLUSIONS
The first name in Black Mishawaka's record is a graduate's. On June 3, 1887, Medora Powell — eldest child of Elijah and Mary Ann Powell — graduated from Mishawaka High School, one of a class of ten, the school's first Black…
Latino Mishawaka: present, and thinly documented
THE NEWEST COMMUNITY · STATED AT THE RECORD'S STRENGTH
The Story of Mishawaka section names a Mexican Mishawaka among the peoples of the factory age, and the modern city's Latino community is a plain demographic fact of the census record carried in this history's spine and…
The Cavemen and the school princess: Mishawaka High as a culture house
1922 OR 1923 TO THE PRESENT
Every Indiana town has a high school; Mishawaka's high school generated two of the city's three durable folk identities, and both are documented. The first began at Cartier Field, in 1922 or 1923, at a football game against South…
The scenes as scenes: bands, stages, and the summer calendar
THE COURSE OF THE CITY'S PUBLIC MUSIC AND PERFORMANCE
The institutions have their own legs; the scene is the weather they all shared, and in Mishawaka the weather was made, for a century, by processions and open air. The documented spine of the city's public music is a sequence of…
The patrons and the memory-keepers: who paid for the culture, and who wrote it down
THE CLASS, NOT THE BIOGRAPHIES
The commissioned history states the mechanism in one sentence, and this entry exists to document it: "Mishawaka's churches, schools, and hospital were paid for, ultimately, by Mishawaka industry." The cultural plant of the city …
The fights: the Tivoli, Prohibition, and the epidemic that closed the stages
WHAT GOT SAVED, WHAT GOT LOST, AND WHO DECIDED
The Tivoli is the theaters leg's house; its end is culture's fight, and the record of the end is unusually blunt. The theater opened on May 21, 1925, on North Main Street — 950 seats on the main floor and 450 above, under a…
The city as others saw it: the vice president, the president, and the morning show
NATIONAL NOTICE AT DOCUMENTED STRENGTH
Mishawaka's documented encounters with the national stage are few enough to print whole, and the first is the largest. On October 28, 1908, Vice President Charles Fairbanks — Indiana's own, a week from the general election — was…