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1893 · THE WORLD'S COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION
The largest fair share in Mishawaka's record was not won at a fairground of its own — it was shipped to Chicago. The World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, held in Jackson Park, caught Mishawaka up, in the city history's phrase, "because of its prominent industries and proximity to Chicago," and the city's presence there ran through every register of a fair: its machinery drove the fair, its products were exhibited and decorated, its church's window hung in the art halls, and its people attended in a body. Dodge Manufacturing supplied the rope drive for the enormous Corliss engines in the exposition's power plant and all the steel shafting equipment for the traveling cranes installed in the Machinery Hall; Dodge also exhibited in the Machinery Hall itself, showing its Independence Wood Split Pulleys, iron pulleys and a full complement of power transmission equipment. Perkins Wind Mill Company was represented at the fair, and St. Joseph Manufacturing Company displayed its plows and other farm implements in the Agricultural Building. Dodge Manufacturing and St. Joseph Manufacturing both returned home, the city history records, with medals and ribbons for their products.
The city's other exhibit was a window. The stained-glass window depicting the Last Supper, made by Chicago's Wells Glass Company for the new St. Joseph Church — the great Gothic church on Third and Spring whose cornerstone, 4,500 pounds of limestone, some ten thousand people had watched laid in August 1891 — was exhibited at the fair in the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. Only after the exposition closed in late October was the window brought to Mishawaka and installed in the church, which was dedicated on 22 October 1893: the fair's visitors saw Mishawaka's window before Mishawaka's parishioners did. And the people went. They traveled by the Lake Shore Railroad, the Grand Trunk Railway, or steamer across the lake; the Lake Shore reported after the fair that it had sold 1,674 tickets for its special trains to Chicago. "Perhaps two-thirds of Mishawaka's residents attended the World's Columbian Exposition," the city history estimates — printed here as the city historian's estimate, at a population then under nine thousand, and no stronger. The same fair that filled Mishawaka's summer was the fair Howard blamed for cooling the county's ardor for its own smaller show; both statements stand in this record, and they are not in conflict. Mishawaka's fairgoing in 1893 was real, enormous, and somebody else's fair — the pattern of 1852 inverted.
Principal sources: Pete De Kever, History of Mishawaka (the city's commissioned history), the 1893 exposition passage, read first-hand; Howard (1907), vol. 1, p. 269, on the exposition's effect on the county fair.