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 marker in Lincoln Park stands at a "supposed grave site" the record does not support — all of that is printed whole in the Story of Mishawaka section's legend entry and is not re-argued here. What belongs to culture is the other half of the fact, which is just as documented and considerably stranger: knowing or not knowing the tale was fiction, Mishawaka spent the twentieth century acting it out in public, and built its public name on it.

The career opened on the Fourth of July 1909, when the city staged its Historical Pageant for the completion of the Hotel Mishawaka and a civic homecoming: ten thousand people watched an Indian canoe procession come down the river, with Frederick Eberhart — the city's leading industrialist — playing Chief Elkhart and Jennie Skelly playing the Princess; a parade of 106 floats and several bands drew more than twenty thousand spectators; the princess raised the city flag to open the hotel, and that evening, before a crowd of five thousand with Mayor Charles Frank presiding, she threw the switch that lit Mishawaka's first electric streetlights. The choice the city made that day deserves to be stated plainly, because the record supports it: to celebrate its most modern hour — a new hotel, a new light system — Mishawaka did not dress a mayor or an inventor in the place of honor. It dressed a young woman as a character from a thirty-four-year-old storybook and let her turn the lights on.

The choice was renewed at each of the city's great birthdays. At the centennial of 1932 a Princess Mishawaka contest crowned Virginia Ainlay, a Mishawaka High School student; the Daughters of the American Revolution dedicated a boulder and bronze plaque in Lincoln Park to the princess at her supposed grave before a thousand people; and the centennial pageant retold her story before six to ten thousand. At the sesquicentennial of 1983 the city ran a Princess Mishawaka contest again, and its Founder's Day program reenacted the 1932 pageant itself — the city now performing not the legend but its own earlier performance of the legend. Between the birthdays, the high school kept the office filled annually, crowning a Princess Mishawaka in connection with the Central football classic, as the schools record documents. And the name hardened into the city's ordinary synonym: Janice Bridges titled her history of the city's first century Indiana's Princess City; Peter J. De Kever titled his walking-tour book Walking Mishawaka: Self-Guided Tours of Historic Sites in the Princess City; and the city's own commissioned history uses "the Princess City" as a plain place-name throughout, writing of the population that "grew to 42,608 by 1990" in the Princess City and of the 2000 census count of 46,557 persons "in the Princess City" without pausing to explain the phrase.

The synthesis the record supports is this. Mishawaka's founding facts were industrial and unromantic — a bog-iron furnace, a land speculation, a company village — and its real name was a Potawatomi place-name whose meaning the record itself gives three ways. The princess supplied what those facts could not: a person, a face, and a story a crowd could watch from a riverbank. The city did not merely inherit her; it re-elected her at every anniversary, put her name on its histories, and taught her to its schoolchildren as the Story of Mishawaka section records. A nickname that descends from a tested fiction is not therefore a false fact about the city. It is the truest available evidence of what the city wanted to be seen as — and the wanting, repeated on the record for over a century, is the cultural fact this section exists to carry.

Sources:

1. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History (city-commissioned history) — the 1909 pageant and homecoming, the 1932 centennial program and marker dedication, the 1983 sesquicentennial, and the history's own unglossed use of "the Princess City" for the 1990 and 2000 populations.
2. The Story of Mishawaka section of this record, legend entry — the test of the tale against the documents, printed whole there and cross-referenced here at pointer size.
3. Janice Bridges, Indiana's Princess City: The History of Mishawaka 1832–1932 — the nickname carried as a book title.
4. Peter J. De Kever, Walking Mishawaka: Self-Guided Tours of Historic Sites in the Princess City — the nickname carried as a book title, second instance.
5. Mishawaka High School, The Miskodeed (yearbook), 1943 edition, full text at archive.org — the school's annual Princess Mishawaka crowning and court; the schools record carries the school-side whole.