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 — its library, its churches' towers, its hospital wings, its very pageants — was financed out of the works, and the record lets the class be seen at work. Frederick Eberhart donated the land at Hill and First Streets on which the Carnegie library rose in 1916 — and the same Frederick Eberhart had, seven years earlier, played Chief Elkhart in the canoe procession of 1909, the industrialist inside the pageant he helped stage, paddling the legend down the river his factories lined. His children built the Gothic Methodist Episcopal church at Third and Church Streets, of Bedford limestone with a 119-foot steeple, as a memorial to their parents — the church's course is the religion record's; its financing is this entry's. Andrew Carnegie's part was the national patron's standard instrument, a building grant answered by local citizens' asking and Eberhart's land; and the building the money bought declined the standard Carnegie classicism for ornate Flemish gables, as the library record details — a Belgian inflection in brick, whether or not the architect intended the enclave's compliment. The hospital's 1918 addition, more than doubling St. Joseph Hospital, was funded by a donor who insisted on anonymity for years before the record released his name: Emmett Saunders. The pattern across the class is consistent enough to state: Mishawaka's patrons gave land, buildings, and wings rather than endowments and galas, they gave to the institutions their own workforce used, and at least one of them gave in secret. The 100 Center conversion a half-century later — local investors under planner T. Brooks Brademas converting the brewery rather than razing it — is the same class instinct in a later dialect, and is carried whole in the malls record.

Beside the patrons stand the memory-keepers, the class that produced the record itself, and culture owns them because the city's self-image is their work product. Vincent Brunner — born in Switzerland in 1862, brought to Mishawaka at five, a businessman who appointed himself the city's historian — spent decades gathering stories and clippings and wrote 137 essays toward a history he called Mishawaka, Its Rise and Progress, which was never published. His surviving doctrine is the epigraph of the city's commissioned history and the clearest statement of the identity this section documents: "We should always bear in mind that Mishawaka should be a distinct and separate community with its own inspiration" — the smaller city's refusal, on principle, to be absorbed into its larger neighbor's story, maintained as a cultural program. Janice Bridges carried the tradition into print with Indiana's Princess City, her history of the city's first century; the genealogical society that certified pioneer descendants in 1983 and the historians of the present West End, Susanna Ernst chief among them in the record reached, continue the office; and Peter J. De Kever, the city's commissioned historian, is its current holder — the present history's own author being, by the city's long custom, a cultural officer of the place he chronicles. A city that commissions its history, titles it with its nickname, and opens it with a Swiss immigrant's plea for separateness is telling the truth about itself in the act of writing: the memory was always part of the culture, not a commentary on it.

Sources:

1. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — the "paid for, ultimately, by Mishawaka industry" sentence; the Eberhart library land and his 1909 Chief Elkhart; the Carnegie asking; the Saunders anonymity and its release; Brunner's life, 137 essays, and unpublished manuscript; Bridges' history.
2. City of Mishawaka, mishawaka.in.gov — Brunner's "distinct and separate community" sentence, as the commissioned history's epigraph.
3. The religion, library-history, and malls records of this history — the Eberhart memorial church, the Carnegie building's architecture, and the 100 Center conversion, carried whole there.