Mishawaka Fairs: One Fair of Its Own, and a Share in Everyone Else's

Fairs · One Fair of Its Own, and a Share in Everyone Else's

Mishawaka hosted exactly one county fair in its history, and the record of it is good: in the fall of 1852 the St. Joseph County Agricultural Society brought its second annual fair to Mishawaka, the town paid every expense, and the next year a South Bend newspaper judged its own hometown fair inferior to Mishawaka's "in all respects, except the stock and pomological departments." After 1852 the county fair never came back. It lived the rest of its course on grounds in South Bend — the courthouse yard, Washington Street, Portage Avenue, the forty acres on the river that became Potawatomi Park, and in the 4-H era a rotation of township offers that ended at Ironwood and Jackson — and Mishawaka's part in it became a share rather than a seat: Penn Township men among the society's founders and incorporators, exhibitors and champions carrying Mishawaka's name in the results, Mishawaka judges on the state fair's own committees as early as 1858, and Mishawaka industry exhibited at the greatest fair of the century, the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. The city never built a fairground of its own. What it had instead was a circus field it licensed, a Main Street it once filled with carnival rides for a centennial week, and in the modern record a summer festival of its own numbering. This section prints that whole record at its documented size — the hosted fair whole, the share at boundary size, the negatives where the tests were run and came back empty.