Mishawaka Dealerships: From the Harness Shops to the Auto Rows

The Dealerships · From the Harness Shops to the Auto Rows

No Mishawaka maker stands in the brass-era sellers’ record — though the city did build cars, the Simplex and Amplex of 1906–1915, as the Automobiles record prints whole — and for its first two decades of motoring it barely sold them: the trade's first full directory census, in 1921, finds exactly two automobile sellers in the city, one of them an electrical shop that took a car agency as a sideline and the other a branch of a South Bend house. But the city's dealers organized early and showed early — in May 1916 Mishawaka's sellers joined South Bend's in a joint auto trade association and a four-day show that paraded two hundred cars through both cities — and the trade the directories then watch growing is a durable one. A Ford point planted as a branch in 1921 passed through the O'Neil house to the Kapson family, whose Jordan stores still sell under the family name. A Chevrolet store opened by a Plymouth, Indiana, grocer as a side business in 1928 stands today on McKinley Avenue in its fourth generation. The postwar canvass of 1949 catches the field at its fullest — eight sellers, including a garage selling Kaiser-Frazers, a make that had not existed four years earlier, and a Chrysler-Plymouth house that also sold Reo trucks — and the canvasses of 1956 and 1963 watch that field consolidate: the small downtown companion-make points vanish, the survivors move out Lincolnway and McKinley toward the ground the Grape Road era would build on, and the corridor's auto row turns out to have roots a generation older than the mall. What follows is that record, house by house and canvass by canvass, at the size the directories, the period press and the trade press carry it.