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1853 TO 1903 · THE INSTITUTION AT BOUNDARY SIZE — SOUTH BEND'S TO OWN
The Mishawaka fair was not the start of a rotation; it was the whole of it. After 1852 the society's fairs returned to South Bend and never left. The 1853 fair stood on the Washington Street acres described above. The society reorganized again on 15 March 1858 and bought grounds on Portage Avenue — seven and a half acres enclosed by a tight board fence seven feet high, the native trees left standing, an office building of 16 by 20 feet at the eastern end, and near the center a floral hall 24 by 48 feet. There the society held its eighth annual exhibition on 28, 29 and 30 September 1858 — the numbering carried across the reorganization — and prospered for several years before misfortune and suspension overtook it. Its last annual fair ran 16 to 20 September 1872; in 1873 an exhibition was held in connection with the Northern Indiana Fair, and after that the society, in Chapman's words, "has not had an organized existence." The county's 1916 soil survey, quoted in South Bend's record, closed the era in a sentence: "The county fair was a great attraction for many years, but these were discontinued in 1872."
The fair's second life, on the river grounds bought in 1881 and in the 4-H era that followed, belongs to South Bend's telling and stands whole in that city's farms article. It is carried here only at the size Mishawaka's share requires, in the two entries that follow. What this entry fixes is the shape of the whole: across three societies, four grounds and a hundred and eighty-five years of claimed descent, Mishawaka ground hosted the county fair once, in 1852, and the institution's every other seat stood in South Bend or, in the 4-H rotation, in the townships that offered it room. No record reached by this build shows a second county fair on Mishawaka ground, and the negative is printed at that strength — a statement about the record reached, with the town's newspaper of record, the Enterprise, still undigitized for the years that would settle it beyond argument.
Principal sources: Chapman (1880), ch. XIII, read first-hand; Howard (1907), vol. 1, pp. 267–270, read first-hand; the county fair's whole course as owned by South Bend's farms article in that city's full record.