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1858 · THE SEVENTH ANNUAL INDIANA STATE FAIR
Six years after it hosted the county fair, Mishawaka sat in judgment at the state fair. The premium list for the Seventh Annual Indiana State Fair, published in the Daily State Sentinel of Indianapolis on 1 April 1858, names the committees appointed to examine each department and award its premiums — and two of those committees carry a Mishawaka name. In the department of manufactures, Section Two, covering edge tools and hardware — the best chopping axes and broad axes, drawing knives, hatchets, assortments of edge tools and cutlery, silver ware, rifles and shot guns, furnaces, circular saws, boring and morticing machines, cooking and parlor stoves, tin and sheet-iron ware, railway rail specimens and farm gates — the committee of five is printed: "I. P. Smith, New Albany; A. T. Buell, Valparaiso; Thomas Sunman, Hermon P. O.; M. Whitesides, Wabash; Mr. Bement, Mishawaka." In Section Four, carriages and cabinet ware — two-horse carriages, buggies, sleighs and sulkeys against bureaus, wardrobes, sofas, bedsteads, secretaries and chairs — the committee reads: "Ben. Platt, Salem; T. Graham, Mishawaka; M. Powell, Madison; E. T. Sumner, Moorsville, Morgan co.; B. Tower, Fort Wayne."
The entries are small and the build prints them at their size, because they are the state fair's own paper: in 1858 the Indiana State Fair was a young institution — the seventh annual — and its judging committees were drawn from the state's towns of standing. That two of its committees took a man from Mishawaka, a town of some two thousand people, and that both committees were in the manufactures departments rather than the farm classes, fits the Mishawaka the businesses record documents — a town whose name already stood for iron, edge tools and mill work rather than for champion livestock. What is printed here is what the state fair's own published list proves: Mishawaka judged at Indianapolis in 1858, twice.
Principal sources: Daily State Sentinel (Indianapolis), 1 April 1858 — the premium list of the Seventh Annual Indiana State Fair, read first-hand (Hoosier State Chronicles).