The Grounds "Between South Bend and Mishawaka," and Penn Township's Share

1881 TO 1903 · THE NORTHERN INDIANA AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY

The county fair's grandest seat stood between the two cities, and the phrase has to be read exactly. Under the state act of 1873, which let a county spend up to five thousand dollars buying land for agricultural and horticultural fairs, the St. Joseph County commissioners ordered on 20 April 1881 the purchase of forty acres "on the north side of the St. Joseph river, between South Bend and Mishawaka" — the southeast quarter of the southeast quarter of section seven, township thirty-seven north, range three east. The land lay within South Bend, and it is South Bend's ground in this build: the city took custody of it on 3 April 1906 and made it Potawatomi Park, which it remains. Mishawaka's claim on the era is not the ground. It is the men.

The Northern Indiana Agricultural Society was formed on 3 February 1881 to hold fairs on the county's grounds — a stock company, shares five dollars, without limit — and Howard prints its incorporators, "among the strong men of the county, representing every township." Read by township, the list is Mishawaka's founding share of the institution: twelve of the named incorporators were Penn Township men — J. H. Eberhart, Aaron Jones, Charles G. Towle, C. L. Stiles, Henry Studebaker, John R. Shank, W. W. Butterworth, Edward A. Jernegan, J. M. Wommer, Joseph Miller, F. R. Eberhart and A. Eberhart. The Eberharts were Mishawaka's own — the name of the city's great park and of its first iron generation — and Charles G. Towle's connection to the fair outlasted the society itself: when a new society was formed on 31 March 1899 to take over the property and revive the fair, restoring the old name of the St. Joseph County Agricultural Society, Towle of Penn stood again among its twelve incorporators. The revival failed anyway. On 4 June 1903 the society formally surrendered the county grounds to the commissioners, and Howard's chapter on the county's agricultural societies closes there. Howard also dates the decline in terms Mishawaka will meet again in this section: it was the World's Fair at Chicago in 1892 and 1893, with its extraordinary exhibits, that first turned the people's interest away from "the simpler and more homelike display of our local fair."

One disaster of the grounds' course touches the whole county and is carried here in a line: on Wednesday, 22 September 1886, a hailstorm broke over the county fair grounds during the fair — horses struck by hailstones ran with buggies, wagons and carriages in every direction through a crowded ground, and happily, Howard records, no one was seriously injured. The storm's whole course is South Bend's to tell; the fair-day disaster stands in that city's article. What belongs to this entry is the sum: for twenty-two years the county fair's seat stood a short ride from Mishawaka's eastern edge, on ground Mishawaka did not own, run by a society Mishawaka's township had helped to found in numbers out of proportion to its size — twelve of some fifty incorporators from the fair's host township of 1852. The share is printed at exactly that size: founders and ground-neighbors, never hosts.

Principal sources: Howard (1907), vol. 1, pp. 269–270, read first-hand — the commissioners' order of 20 April 1881, the incorporator list of 3 February 1881 with townships, the revival of 31 March 1899, the surrender of 4 June 1903, and the hailstorm of 22 September 1886.