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 & Michigan Electric Company's connections, toward Chicago and, in a proving transmission the commissioned history records, as far as Boston — the city "adopted the sobriquet of 'The Power City' in the 1920s," in De Kever's words. No princess was required: the boast was a meter reading. The two nicknames divide the city's self-regard between them with unusual neatness — the Princess City for its anniversaries, its histories and its homecomings; the Power City for its working identity in the decade when the works were young and the current went out over the wires to other people's cities.

The industrial self-image outlasted the sobriquet, and its present form is worth recording because it is easy to miss: the works' names have passed into the city's pleasure geography. The Ball Band works are gone — closed for good in 1997, imploded on June 17, 2000, as the Ball Band record in this history establishes — but the summer concert series the city runs today includes a Ball Band Biergarten on the Ironworks ground, and the Kamm & Schellinger brewery complex, closed in 1951 and converted as 100 Center, anchors the downtown end of the same riverfront. A Mishawakan of 2026 drinks a beer at a venue named for a rubber works and hears a band on an island named for a brewer. The names survived the industries, and the city's culture now keeps them the way it keeps the princess: as inheritance, worn lightly, and everywhere.

Sources:

1. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — Twin Branch and the adoption of "The Power City" in the 1920s; the regional and proving transmissions.
2. South Bend Tribune, summer concert guide (2026) — the Ball Band Biergarten and Kamm Island Stage among the city's current concert venues; present-state evidence, November 2026.
3. The Ball Band and malls records of this history — the works' closure and implosion, and the 100 Center conversion, carried whole there.