The vice president's evening: Charles Fairbanks in Mishawaka, 1908

October 28, 1908 · St. Paul's Church, the mayor's house, and the Century Theater

The visit: On October 28, 1908 — a week before the general election — Charles W. Fairbanks, the sitting Vice President of the United States and Indiana's own, came to Mishawaka, and the city turned out for him twice in one evening. He was met in Elkhart by a committee of leading Republicans and escorted to Mishawaka in a caravan of automobiles. He supped at St. Paul's Episcopal Church as the Bishop Knickerbacker Guild's honored guest, speaking briefly to the three hundred people crammed into the undercroft and shaking hands in the rectory. He rode then to Mayor Charles Frank's residence at 813 West Second Street and addressed more than a thousand gathered outside. A parade of touring cars carried the party through the downtown. Outside the Century Theater he spoke fifteen to twenty minutes to five thousand people in the street, and then went inside and addressed the convocation of Republican enthusiasts for over an hour, complimenting Mishawakans on their city's growth.

The size of it: The crowds are the event's measure, and they are enumeration, not rhetoric: five thousand people in a street, twice-turned-out thousands more, in a city of some twelve thousand. The commissioned history's verdict on the four hours is "the most thrilling evening in the city's history" — a boast, printed here as its author's. What the evening documents without boasting is what a national visitation meant to a factory city in 1908, when the second officer of the republic could still be received with a church supper, a mayor's front yard, and a theater: the whole population, assembled, in one evening, on foot. The visit's meaning for the city's self-image — the largest entry in its file of national notice — is Culture's, told there; the evening's course as an event is this entry's.

Sources:

1. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — the visit of October 28, 1908 whole: the Elkhart escort, the St. Paul's supper and the three hundred in the undercroft, the mayor's residence and the thousand outside, the touring-car parade, the five thousand outside the Century Theater, the hour's address within, and the "most thrilling evening" verdict, quoted as its author's.
2. St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Mishawaka, parish history (Episcopal Diocese of Northern Indiana archives) — the 1908 dinner in the undercroft hosted by the Bishop Knickerbacker Guild, corroborating the visit's Mishawaka course.
3. Culture section of this history — the visit as the city's national notice, with the 2006 presidential visit ninety-eight years on.