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1897 TO 1960 · CROSS-REFERENCE TO THE ZOO LEG
A city without a fairground still needs somewhere to put the tents, and Mishawaka's answer was the circus ground. The circus record whole — the shows, their animals, their routes — is the zoo leg's, dug there as that leg's test of the city's animal history, and it is cross-referenced here at the size of the ground alone. The field enters the record on Monday, 28 June 1897, when the J. H. LaPearl Shows, a railroad menagerie carrying two elephants, a hippopotamus, a camel and ten cross cages, played the town and set the pattern: a show arrived, pitched on open ground at the town's edge, and left nothing standing. In June 1915 the pattern inverted — the circus pitched in South Bend, and "Mishawaka emptied itself into South Bend Thursday to see the circus," the News-Times' Mishawaka page recorded on 10 June 1915: when the fair-type event would not come to Mishawaka, Mishawaka went to it, as it had gone to its own county fair's grounds on the river for thirty years.
The ground itself is documented once, in a citizen's complaint, and the letter is the closest description the city has of a standing fair-type field. On 9 June 1920 J. L. Rooks wrote to the South Bend News-Times about the night of Monday, 7 June 1920 at "the circus grounds" — also "the circus field" — in Mishawaka: the side shows and games of chance had run wide open, the city had granted the permit and collected the license fee, and the city council had cancelled its own regular meeting that night, its members being at the show. The zoo leg's judgment on that field stands as this section's too: it was the closest thing to a standing fair institution the city ever possessed, and it was a field with tents on it, empty the rest of the year. The postwar stands continue the pattern in the zoo leg's record — the Mills Bros. Circus of Ohio played Mishawaka on 20 July 1942, 24 July 1943 and 17 May 1960 — and living memory puts the postwar tents on the Dodge works' parking lot, printed in that leg at memory's strength and no stronger. The companion test this section ran for itself comes back negative and is printed plainly: no Mishawaka driving park, trotting ground or race meet course appears in any record this build could reach. The county's horse racing — the great draw of the fair's river-grounds years — stood on the fairgrounds in South Bend. Mishawaka's fair-type ground was a field for rent to traveling shows, licensed by the city and complained about in its letters column: the fair, in this city, was always a visitor.
Principal sources: this build's zoo leg and its sources — the J. H. LaPearl route as printed in Bandwagon, April–May 1952 (Circus Historical Society); South Bend News-Times, 10 June 1915 and 9 June 1920 (the Rooks letter), read first-hand there; Mills Bros. Circus routes (Circus Historical Society).