Farms and Crops of Mishawaka and St. Joseph County: The Mill Town's Farm Ground

Farms & Crops · The Mill Town's Farm Ground

Mishawaka was a mill town from its first plat, but the town was planted in a farming township, fed by farms, and ground its flour from farm wheat. The agricultural record of the place is therefore two records at once: the record of Penn Township, the large and rich farming township in which the town was laid out and which still wraps its south side, and the record of the town ground itself, which began as cleared timber and drained marsh and was farms before it was streets. Neither record is large beside the county's. St. Joseph County as a whole was one of the strong agricultural counties of Indiana, and its whole course — the wheat era, the corn-and-livestock order, the muck farms and the mint — stands in South Bend's farms article. What stands here is Mishawaka's own: the ground, the first farmers, the township's mills and the town's flouring trade, and one crop — peppermint — in which the Mishawaka district once led the state.

The ground before the farms: timber, marsh, and the Island

Penn township, as Chapman found it in 1880, was "a timbered country." The first obstacle to farming was the forest itself: in the pioneer days, with no wagon roads, a settler could become lost between one cabin and another in the dense timber. The second obstacle was water. A large amount of the township was marsh land which a team could hardly traverse, and travel went by circuitous routes to avoid it. Chapman describes the great marsh exactly: it extended from the St. Joseph river near South Bend toward the southeast, almost the entire length of the township, varying from three-fourths of a mile to two miles in width, and near its center stood an elevated, oblong tract of two to three hundred acres under cultivation, known to the township simply as "the Island." The citizens of Penn regarded the marsh, Chapman says, as once an arm of Lake Michigan. Howard, writing in 1907, calls the same ground the La Salle swamp — the swamp behind which La Salle lost his way — and describes it as the large marsh between Mishawaka and the hills to the south, extending almost from the west to the east of the township. Both histories agree on what the marsh became, and that agreement is the foundation fact of the township's farming: drained, it turned into some of the most fertile land in Penn township — in Howard's words, through drainage all these lowlands became tillable and are amongst the most fertile lands of the county.

The farming of the ground did not begin with the settlers. When the village of St. Joseph Iron Works was laid out in 1833 on the south bank, the Potawatomi village of Mishawaka stood on what became Taylor's Addition, and Chapman records that the Indians had a small tract of land cleared there, where "the large corn hills, which were of a conical shape, and about two feet high, remained there for several years after this country was settled." The first crop record of the town ground, that is, is a corn record, and it is an Indian one.

The first farmers of Penn, 1828 and after

Penn township formerly contained Harris and Madison and portions of Centre and Portage; the township the first settlers entered was far larger than the one on the modern map. The first settlers, Chapman records, were William and Timothy Moat, who located about 1828 on section 17. Soon afterward came William Holt, Jesse Skinner, S. L. Cottrell, James Curtis, the Byrkits, the Irelands and others. The first election was held in 1832, and Alpheus Ireland was one of the first justices of the peace. Nathan W. Young preempted land while the government surveyors were still at work and himself carried chain for the survey.

The conditions of that first farming are part of the record. The pioneers took their mail at Edwardsville, in Cass County, Michigan, carried on horseback from Fort Wayne. Their first wheat was ground at a mill located below Niles, Michigan — the township had no mill of its own at the start, and a Penn farmer's wheat went out of the state to be ground. Chapman's sketch of the township is built from the pioneers' own testimony, and he warns the reader at its head that he found conflicting statements in some particulars; the settler list and dates stand as he printed them.

Bancroft's mills: the township's own grist point

The township's first mill seat was not at Mishawaka but on Baugo Creek, near where the village of Osceola now stands. In 1831 or 1832 a sawmill was built on the creek; several years afterward another mill was built a little lower down, the same race extended so that one dam answered for both. This last mill was erected by Zelotes Bancroft, though Chapman states plainly that its date is not certainly known. In 1856, the earlier mill having been discontinued, Bancroft and his brother William erected a saw and grist mill on the same site, which in 1880 was owned and conducted by a nephew of the brothers. Its capacity was twenty-five barrels a day; Bancroft, Chapman says, was a life-long miller who made the best of flour, and the sawmill attachment ran in connection with the flouring mill. The point for the farm record is the geography: a Penn Township farmer on the township's east side had a grist point of his own, at Osceola, separate from the big flouring mills at the river — and the Bancroft mill ground at a custom scale, twenty-five barrels against the river mills' hundreds.

The flouring town: the farm end of Mishawaka's mills

The first flouring mill at Mishawaka was erected in 1835 by Mr. Taylor, two years after the town was platted — the furnace town ground flour from its infancy. By 1858 the trade had become the town's largest manufacture by value: the Mishawaka Enterprise of 5 March 1859 and the St. Joseph Valley Register of 17 March 1859, as compiled in Ward Baker's study of the village on the eve of the Civil War, put the value of Mishawaka's manufactures in 1858 at $407,000 in total, of which flour accounted for $125,000 — ahead of wagons and carriages at $120,000, lumber at $50,000, and iron castings at $30,000. The 1868 business directory of the county lists three flouring mills in the town: A. B. Judson & Co.'s Mishawaka Flouring Mill at the foot of Mill Street; the Ripple Flouring Mill of A. Eberhart & Co. on the south race at the foot of Main; and the St. Joseph Flouring Mill of Coon & Bros. on the north race. The 1889 directory still lists A. & J. H. Eberhart & Co. among the town's millers.

Chapman's 1880 account of the enterprises gives the scale at which the town mills drew on the farm country. The Mishawaka Mills, erected in 1830 by his account and purchased in 1876 by Joseph and William Miller, ran five sets of burrs and made about 225 barrels of flour daily, flour that stood "at the head of the market, both in the East and West." The Ripple Mills, built by A. Cass & Co. and by 1880 in the hands of J. H. and A. Eberhart, had five runs of stones and a capacity of 225 barrels in twenty-four hours, with a large trade in the East. The St. Joseph Mill, erected in 1861 by George and Casper Kuhn and August Kellner and by 1880 George Kuhn's alone, had a capacity of 150 barrels in twenty-four hours and did mostly a jobbing business; all three made patent flour. Chapman closes the Mishawaka chapter by joining the two halves of the record in one sentence: the town stands on two railroads, and "the surrounding country is one of extraordinary fertility." The mills are the businesses leg's as manufactories; what the farm record claims is the direction of the trade — three mills with a combined stated capacity of some 600 barrels a day in 1880 is a wheat demand standing in the middle of a farming township, and the wheat came out of Penn and the townships around it.

The county frame, dated and boundary-printed

The censuses of agriculture count counties. No census of agriculture ever counted Mishawaka or Penn Township separately in the published county volumes used for this build, and none is implied here: the figures in this entry are St. Joseph County's, printed as the frame inside which the township's record sits. In 1879, the county's threshed product, as Chapman prints it from the census, was 811,037 bushels of wheat, 829,554 bushels of corn and 143,791 bushels of oats; in the fifty years of the county's organized existence there had been, Chapman says, no total failure of crops and only one total failure of the wheat crop — the frost of early June 1835, which caught the wheat in full bloom and destroyed it.

The modern frames run so. In 1950 the county had 2,408 farms on 221,456 acres, an average of 92.0 acres; in 1954, 1,938 farms on 212,109 acres, average 109.4 acres, with 141,227 acres of cropland harvested in 1954. In 2017 the county had 629 farms on 149,981 acres, average 238 acres, and sold $103,949,000 of products. In 2022 it had 547 farms — thirteen percent fewer — on 153,034 acres, two percent more, the average farm grown to 280 acres, and sold $162,244,000. The township story is inside those numbers and cannot be separated out of them: fewer and larger farms, on land that did not shrink. The one township-level farm frame the record offers is named in this section's note rather than printed here, because its figures were not extracted: the 1930 Census of Agriculture's first volume gives farm acreage and values by minor civil divisions, Penn Township included.

Penn Township in 1907: the largest, and perhaps the richest

Howard's description of Penn as it stood in 1907 is the fullest single statement of the township's farm standing in the record. The original Penn of 6 May 1832 had comprised the whole county east of range two east; Harris, parts of Clay, Centre and Union, and all of Madison had since been taken from it, and parts had been added to Portage in 1836 and 1850. "Notwithstanding the great amount of territory taken from Penn, it still remains the largest township in the county, containing sixty-five and a half sections of land, almost equal to two congressional townships. It is perhaps also, take it altogether, the richest township in the county." The soil and characteristics of its south part match adjoining Madison — the township whose sawmill-and-ditch story Howard tells as the conversion of a forbidding timbered swamp country into "the most valuable farming section of the county," its soil "of inexhaustible fertility." The St. Joseph river flows east to west through Penn's north part, receiving Twin Branch and Baugo creeks from the south, and the large marsh between Mishawaka and the southern hills is the township's principal lowland. It is on that drained marsh that the township's signature crop grew.

Peppermint: the Mishawaka district's crop

The drained La Salle swamp was tried first with celery, as at Kalamazoo; Howard records that the celery industry "has been engaged in at Mishawaka." But the reclaimed lowlands proved, in his words, "even more perfectly adapted to the cultivation of peppermint," and the account he prints — taken principally, his footnote says, from a report written for the Indianapolis News of 13 October 1906 — is the largest single document in this section. It deserves to stand at length.

The world's supply of high-grade peppermint oil, the News reported, came from the northern Indiana counties, southern Michigan and Wayne County, New York; the low-grade supply came from Japan. Indiana's 1906 crop, just harvested and distilled when the report appeared, represented a little more than 50,000 pounds of the 250,000 pounds of national production, worth considerably more than $100,000 in ordinary markets, about half of it bound for export to England and Germany. "Mishawaka is the peppermint capital of the Indiana industry, and when the almost one thousand acres of peppermint fields that lie in what might be called the Mishawaka district are in harvest, and when the distilling plants are running, the air is filled with the aroma of the mint." The district covered, the report says, practically all of the mint fields in St. Joseph county; the culture ran on also in Elkhart, LaGrange, Noble, Steuben, DeKalb, Marshall and LaPorte counties.

The work is described whole. The mint was felled with a three-and-a-half-foot swath by a reaper driven in from the timothy or clover meadow, raked into windrows like clover, loaded green onto hay wagons, and hauled not to a barn loft but to the distillation plants, where it was dumped in ton lots into great wooden casks, tramped tight and screwed down. Steam driven up through the cask liquefied the oil in the leaves; the oil-steam passed to condensing pipes under running water and out into separating tanks, where the oil floated free. A ton of mint stayed about an hour in the tanks and produced ordinarily ten to twelve pounds of oil. The ordinary yield was twenty-five to thirty-five pounds of oil an acre — at $2.50 a pound, $62.50 to $87.50 cash an acre — but the crop ran as high as sixty-five and even seventy pounds an acre and as low as under twenty, and prices had ranged from fifty cents to six dollars a pound. It was a costly crop: the weeding had to be done by hand, and distillation took considerable labor. The oil, the report notes, is in the leaves — under a powerful glass the underside's velvety finish resolves into minute oil cells — and a man walking a near-mature field and running his hand through the plants carried the odor for hours.

The growers are named. "Jerry Woodward, who lives in Mishawaka, is known over northern Indiana as the 'Indiana Peppermint King.' With his brothers, Walter and William, he has about 320 acres in mint, and this year the Woodward crop ran more than 4,000 pounds. The Woodwards are the largest growers in Indiana and the second largest in this country" — behind A. M. Todd of Kalamazoo, with his 600 to 800 acres. A number of Indiana growers raised 100 to 150 acres a year, each with his own distilling plant, distilling also the crops of the smaller growers. The plant itself was a cross of the wild American mint and the old English Mitcham; from New York it was brought to Michigan, and from Michigan into Indiana sixty or seventy years before 1906 — the first Indiana grower probably Elam Eller of St. Joseph county. Eller is in the township record in his own right: Chapman's biographical department for Mishawaka and Penn township gives Elam Eller, farmer of section 29, Penn township, born in Miami County, Ohio, in 1826, brought to the township by his parents in 1831, owner in 1880 of 250 acres, "engaged in farming and stock-raising." The identification of Chapman's stock farmer with the News account's first mint grower rests on the name and the county, and is printed as probable, exactly as the News itself hedged it. "The Woodward Brothers, who moved from Michigan to Mishawaka, seventeen years ago, were the first extensive growers." Howard's own biographical sketch of the Woodwards, printed elsewhere in his history, gives the same enterprise at a slightly different size — 300 acres of peppermint held with the brothers J. W. and W. M. Woodward, a second 300-acre farm mostly in peppermint, and their own distilling — and the two figures, 320 acres in the News account and 300 in the sketch, stand printed together here unreconciled, as the record leaves them. The occasion of the 1906 report was itself part of the farm record: the peppermint growers and distillers of northern Indiana, southern Michigan and Wayne County, New York, under James A. Everitt of Indianapolis and his American Society of Equity, were entering into a combination to hold their oil for about $2.75 a pound, and the attorney-general's eyes, the News said, had been directed toward the infant combine.

The county frame shows the industry's contraction but not its end. The 1954 Census of Agriculture counted mint for oil on 54 farms and 2,207 acres in St. Joseph County in 1954, against 108 farms and 4,460 acres in 1949 — the acreage halved in five years. Those are county figures, boundary-printed; no source consulted separates the Mishawaka district's share of them, and the district's course after 1906 stands in this section as a named gap, with the census volumes and the Enterprise's film as its settling sources. What can be said at full strength is the shape of the whole: the township's worst ground — a marsh a settler could not cross with a team — became, within one lifetime, the ground of the most valuable crop per acre in the county's record, and for a season the town built on a blast furnace was known across the state as a peppermint capital.

Truck crops: the county's sand and muck, and the township's share

The crops branch of this section runs, below the mint, on the county survey. E. J. Quinn's 1916 soil survey of St. Joseph County — the county section of the state geological survey's report — divides the truck country by soil exactly as the mint record does. On the sand, the county grew potatoes, melons and small fruits; on the muck, onions, celery and cabbage. Onions stood at 239 acres in the county in 1909, chiefly on muck. Cucumbers went from county farms to salting stations at seventy-five and thirty-five cents a bushel. The passage is county-wide and is printed here as county record, boundary-held: Quinn assigns no acreage to Penn Township, and this section does not assign him any. The township's own documented place in the truck economy is the one the mint establishes — Penn held the county's great muck marsh, drained into truck ground of the same class — together with the celery trial on the La Salle swamp that Howard records before the mint displaced it. A Penn celery or onion acreage of any date, and the township's market-gardening course as such, are not in the record reached; they stand in the note as gaps, and the gap is the finding: for a township of Penn's size, the printed crop record is a mint record with a county truck frame around it, not a truck record of its own.

The United States Department of Agriculture's 1916 bulletin on the management of muck-land farms in northern Indiana and southern Michigan places the township's kind of farming in its regional frame, and it is cited at that strength. Surveying 140 muck farms in the region for the farm year ending 1 March 1915, the bulletin finds four distinct types of muck farming — celery, onion, peppermint, and grain-and-stock — and finds the muck well suited to celery, onions, peppermint, cabbage, corn and hay. Its averages belong to its sample, not to Penn Township, and none is printed here as a township figure; what it establishes is that the Mishawaka district's mint type was one of the four settled forms of farming on the region's drained muck, practiced by named growers within a day's haul of the town.

Dairy and creameries: the township's second farming

The modern published history of the two townships — Debra C. Perkins's Penn and Madison Townships in the Images of America series (2006), whose account is photographic and summary in form — carries the township's later farming in a few sentences, and they are printed at exactly that strength. The area that is now Penn and Madison was once heavily wooded; the settlers cut trees for lumber and to clear ground, and the cleared land "became some of the best farmland in the region." The railroads — the Wabash, the Lake Shore and the Grand Trunk, through Wyatt and Osceola — shipped lumber and crops. "As dairy farming spread, creameries were established where farmers could separate their milk and cream — the farmers fed their cattle the skimmed milk, while the cream was made into butter and sold in the local general stores." The book's judgment on the present is its own: the area "is still some of the best farming ground in St. Joseph County."

The county frame behind the dairy sentence is large. In 1954, the census counted 979 county farms reporting 8,567 milk cows, and 588 farms selling 54,537,052 pounds of whole milk for $1,827,230; the number of farms with milk cows had already fallen from 1,407 in 1950. Those are county figures. No creamery in Penn Township is named, dated or placed in the record reached — not at Osceola, not at Wyatt (which stands in Madison), not along the township's rail sidings — and the township's creameries stand as a named gap, with the county directories and the Enterprise film as settling sources. The gap is printed rather than filled because the directory record for the town of Mishawaka itself, which this build has read year by year for other legs, does not speak for the township's stations.

The farmers' institutions, at anchor

The farmers' first institution in the county was the agricultural society, and Penn Township stood in it from its refounding: when the society reorganized at the courthouse on 19 April 1851, the director chosen for Penn was George C. Merrifield — the township's own Merrifield giving his name, in the next century, to the town's Merrifield Park. The Grange had a Penn Township address at its head: Aaron Jones, who resided on section 32 of Penn township on a farm of over 400 acres in the county (with about 100 more in Iowa), "very successful as a farmer and stock-raiser" in Chapman's sketch, was master of the Indiana State Grange in 1880, and Howard credits him with the mastership of the National Grange for several years as well. The society and its fairs, including the one fair Mishawaka hosted in 1852, are the fairs leg's whole; the anchor here is the township's seat at the table. Penn men stood again in the county's fair institutions a generation later: twelve Penn Township men appear among the incorporators of the Northern Indiana Agricultural Society formed 3 February 1881, and Charles G. Towle of Penn among the incorporators of the revival society of 31 March 1899. The county's wider institutional course — the St. Joseph Valley Grange No. 584 and Pomona Grange No. 31, the Farmers' Institutes with their Purdue lecturers, the Farmers' Mutual Fire Insurance Company organized 25 August 1877, and in the next century the Farm Bureau and the extension service that carries the 4-H fair — stands whole in South Bend's farms article; no Mishawaka or Penn chapter, hall or local of any of them is documented in the record reached, and that absence is printed as the township's institutional state at this size, with the Grange and bureau records named in the note as the settling sources. The one institutional fact that is Penn's own is a trustee's: the mint grower Woodward served as Penn Township trustee from 1901 to 1905 — the township's largest specialty farmer holding its civil office in the years of the mint's height.

Farms into streets: the farm ground inside the modern city

The modern city's map is written over the township's farms, and the neighborhoods leg of this build carries the plat-by-plat course; the farm side of that conversion, at pointer size, runs so. The Belgian West End was laid over annexed farmland, and the Great Annexation of 1905 that brought it in was fought by the farmers and property owners who objected, carrying their case to the Indiana Supreme Court. The Milburn Place Land Company, organized in 1905, bought the Henry C. Morgan farm between Burdette and Carlton streets, south of Second Street — Lincolnway — and platted it. Normain Heights, the veterans' subdivision of 1946 and after, was built as a suburb on the farm fringe, and Edison Lakes, from 1988, is the fringe's later form: a headquarters suburb planted, in the neighborhoods leg's phrase, on the city's farm fringe. Each of those conversions is a farm leaving the record by name — the Morgan farm is the one whose owner's name survives its platting.

What remains is the township's south. The city has no separate farm count and no working farm inside its limits is documented in the record reached; the agricultural present of the place is Penn Township outside the city line, where the ground Perkins calls still some of the best farming ground in the county continues in farms under the county frame printed above — 547 county farms on 153,034 acres in 2022, the corn and soybeans of the modern county (71,437 acres of corn for grain and 57,228 of soybeans in 2022) grown in rotation the nineteenth-century record would recognize, on a farm map its makers would not. The farm record of Mishawaka thus ends where it began, in the township: the town took the riverfront, the furnace site and the marsh's north edge; the farms kept the south, and keep it.

The farms pass dug the township parcel by parcel and carried the flagships — peppermint above all — whole. What it did not do was run the county frame as a system: wheat rising and falling, corn and stock replacing it, machines replacing horses, and the whole order being measured as the suburbs took it. Those runs stand here, at county frame, because Penn Township's farms were always counted as the county's.

The wheat era and its passing: the arc the counts support, and the gap inside it

The wheat story's ends stand in the banked file: the first crops of the cleared ground, the first wheat ground below Niles, the flouring trade's measure of the crop's height — $125,000 of flour in 1858, some 600 barrels a day of combined capacity by 1880, and the county's 1879 wheat crop counted at 811,037 bushels. The arc between and after those points is a county story the banked pass left to South Bend's article by pointer. What can be printed here at first hand is the shape the county frame gives it: wheat was the cash crop of the county's first farm generation because the river mills and the lake trade took it; the corn that replaced it was worth more fed through stock on the farm than shipped, which is the system article below; and by the modern censuses wheat is a minor line in this county — the county stands 36th in Indiana in corn and 47th in soybeans in the state's own 2024 accounting, and wheat does not appear among its ranked crops at all. The full dated arc — county wheat acreage and bushels at the census points between 1880 and 1950 — could not be read first-hand for this addendum and is named here as the item's gap, with its settling source: the Census of Agriculture county tables for St. Joseph County (1880–1950, HathiTrust), which print exactly those columns. The arc's ends and its mechanism stand; its middle counts stand named as owed, not invented.

The corn-and-livestock order, as a system

What replaced wheat was not another crop but an order: corn grown to be fed, on the farm, to hogs and cattle, with dairy cows at the farm gate for the city trade, and the inputs — feed, pasture, hay ground — arranged around the animals. The banked file carries its pieces (the 1879 county corn crop of 829,554 bushels; Eller's stock-raising; the dairy article); the system they form is printed here whole from the modern census end, where the order can be counted. In the 2022 Census of Agriculture, St. Joseph County's farms took 80 percent of their sales from crops and 20 percent from livestock, poultry and their products; the county held 34,974 hogs and pigs and 944 horses and ponies at the census date; 141,832 of its 153,034 farm acres were cropland, and 24,052 acres — sixteen percent of the land in farms — were irrigated, a figure that belongs to the truck and specialty ground of the county's north and east as much as to the corn order. The dairy input line runs through the county rank the state prints: 23rd in Indiana in milk cows — a middling dairy county feeding two cities' milk sheds, which is what the banked file's dairy article describes at farm size. The system's course is the course of those proportions backward: a county that once shipped wheat came to ship animals and animal products fed on its own corn, and now ships corn and soybeans (71,437 and 57,228 acres in 2022, as the banked file counts them) off a shrinking farm base. Printed as a system, the pieces stop being a crop list.

Orchards and small fruit: the record's thin line, printed at its size

The word "orchard" does not occur in either farms fragment, and that absence is itself the finding's shape: Penn Township's farm fame ran to mint, grain and truck, not to fruit. What the record reached holds is this: small fruit appears in the banked file once, as one item in Quinn's county sand list inside the truck article — the sandy ground along the river grew berries and small fruit for the city markets among its truck crops; and the county's farm censuses count fruit trees and small-fruit acres in their own columns, which this history could not read first-hand. The item therefore prints at its true, thin size: no commercial orchard industry of record stands on Mishawaka or Penn Township ground in the sources reached — no orchard company, no fruit-shipping association, no named orchardist of standing — and the settling source for the counted version of that statement is the same Census of Agriculture county series named in the wheat article (its orchard and small-fruit columns, 1880–1950). If those columns show a fruit era the prose record missed, this article is where it will be printed; until then the line stands as a searched thinness, not an oversight.

Mechanisation: the succession's ends, and the named gap between them

No tractor is named in either farms fragment, and no horse is counted. The succession the checklist requires — horses to tractors, with county counts at dated points — can be printed here only at its ends. At the near end, the 2022 census counts 944 horses and ponies on the county's farms: the horse survives as a kept animal, not a working one. At the far end stands the banked build's own machinery record in its proper legs: the tractor leg's verdict that Mishawaka made implements and not tractors, and the implements themselves — the city's farm-machinery making is in the industrial record, not the farms record, which is why the farms fragments are silent about machines. The dated middle — the county's horses and mules against its tractors at 1920, 1930, 1940 and 1954, the censuses that counted both — could not be read first-hand for this addendum and is named as the gap, with its settling source: the Census of Agriculture county tables for those years (HathiTrust), whose machinery columns print both sides of the succession in adjacent lines. The succession's fact is not in doubt and is not printed as if it were; its Mishawaka counting is owed, and the owing is printed here so the assembly does not mistake silence for coverage.

The market line: from the flour trade's market to the Sunday market

The farms leg owed the market its own line, from founding to present ground. The early market of this farm economy was the flour trade's — the mills' market, which the banked file carries — and the city's farmers sold across the counters of the grocery and produce trade the business record names. The public market in the modern form is carried in the food record at its size: the Mishawaka Market, a Sunday farmers market at Ironworks Plaza, whose season forms counted 2021 as its third season — a founding in 2019, on the rebuilt Uniroyal ground, which puts the city's farmers market on the same ground as its dead-factory rebirth. This farms article carries that line by reference at full strength and adds the frame the farms leg owns: the market is where the township's remaining farm order (the system article above) meets the city that replaced most of it, and its ground — a plaza over the Ball Band works — is the suburban-conversion article's whole argument in one address. No earlier municipal market house or chartered public market for Mishawaka appears in the sources reached; the settling source for a founding-era market is the Enterprise file and the city's ordinance record. The line stands: flour market, produce trade, Sunday market — with the gap between the second and third printed, not smoothed.

Suburban conversion, measured: the county's farm acres at dated points

The banked article named the conversions by date — the Belgian West End and the Great Annexation of 1905, the Morgan farm platted in 1905, Normain Heights from 1946, Edison Lakes in 1988 — and left the loss unmeasured. The county frame measures it. The county comprehensive plan's own table, drawn from the Census of Agriculture, prints land in farms for St. Joseph County at 172,500 acres in 1982, 174,226 in 1987, 172,348 in 1992 and 154,142 in 1997 — a plateau, then a fall of more than 18,000 acres in five years, the plan itself calling the change alarming — with the number of farms falling over the same span from about 1,000 to about 680 on the plan's approximate chart figures. The modern census continues the line: 149,981 acres in 629 farms in 2017; 153,034 acres in 547 farms in 2022 — acreage roughly level on the county's remaining ground while the farms themselves keep consolidating, average size rising from 238 to 280 acres. The state's farmland-loss accounting, reported in September 2024, prices the conversion by destination: St. Joseph County lost 11,485 agricultural acres between 2010 and 2022, of which 9,673 acres went to residential use, 1,090 to industrial and 720 to commercial — four-fifths of the loss is housing, which is to say the suburbs of the two cities, Mishawaka's own east and south growth among them. Farmland still made up 51 percent of the county's roughly 293,000 acres in the state's accounting. What farms remain, and what they grow, stands in the system article: corn and soybeans first, irrigated truck ground, hogs the leading animal line, and the nursery and greenhouse trade — the one farm line that grows with the suburbs instead of retreating from them — carried in the county at the census's own size, its Mishawaka houses named in the business record. The conversion is no longer a list of subdivisions; it is a measured transfer, dated at both ends.

Farms & Crops — Second Pass · The 1875 Plat and the 1930 Table

The first of those pulls is landed whole and stands below at the plate's own strength — the township's farm ground drawn parcel by parcel five years before Chapman described it in prose. The second pull is landed in part: the table is identified, its headings are read, and the place of the Penn Township row in the printed volume is fixed exactly — but the page that carries the row is missing from the federal scan, and no figure from it is printed here. What each pull settled, and what each one corrects, follows.

The 1875 plat: the township drawn whole

The plat is one plate of An Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Joseph County, Indiana (Higgins, Belden & Co., Chicago, 1875), headed "Map of Penn Township" and printed, rotated on the page, at pages 86–87 of the atlas — the township sketch on the left-hand page, the plat on the right. It is the earliest drawn survey of the township's ownership, and it draws the whole of the ground the city now stands on and wraps: all thirty-six sections of Township 37 North, Range 3 East; a strip of Range 2 East sections along the west edge; a fractional strip of Range 4 East at the east margin; and the northern tier of Township 36 North sections along the south — the same irregular whole that Howard counts at sixty-five and a half sections. It is the survey ground of the banked text drawn to the parcel: every acre of the township is parceled, every parcel carries an owner's name and its acreage, and there is no vacant, unclaimed or government tract anywhere on the plate. The standard fabric of the federal survey — the 160-acre quarter-section, the 80, the 40 — holds across most of the township, breaking into many small lots along Baugo Creek and in the ground near the town, where the farm fabric thins toward the mill ground. Small house glyphs mark farmsteads on individual parcels. The town of Mishawaka itself is not on this plate; the atlas gives the town its own plats elsewhere in the volume, and the riverfront parcels at the bend read as farm parcels here — "Buech & Garnhart 74.60" among them.

The great parcels, and two companies on the land

The largest single parcel on the plate is J. Laidlaw's 400 acres in section 35, in the township's southeast. Two men hold a full half-section in one parcel: O. Towle, 320 acres in section 25, and W. Milburn, 320 acres in section 20. Below them the plate's two-hundred-acre class runs deep: J. Ham, 265.75 acres; the estate of F. G. Eberhart Sen., 214; J. Bartell, 205.65; G. Fultzler, 200 in section 24, with O. Fultzler holding 240 more in section 26; C. L. Stiles, 200 in section 21; C. Weiss Sen., 200 in section 28; D. Greenawalt, 200 in the Range 2 East strip; the estate of D. Grimes, 199.31 in section 24; J. Bucheit, 199 in section 33; A. Ebberhart, 171.2 in section 8; P. Hendershot, with two parcels of 160.96 and 163.31 in the southeast; C. K. Pulling, 155.4 in section 8; E. Fuller, 153.16 in the Township 36 tier. Two owners on the plate are not men but companies, and both belong to the town's industrial record standing on township land: the St. Joseph Iron Co. holds a 40-acre parcel in the north-center of the township, and the Milburn Wagon Co. holds 81 acres on the west side of sections 15 and 16, beside W. Milburn's own 320 — the wagon company's land lying in the township in a body of its own.

Water, roads and rails — and what the plate does not draw

The St. Joseph River is lettered along its channel across the township's north, with "Mishawaka" printed below the town reach. Baugo Creek is drawn flowing north through Osceola, up sections 17, 8 and 5, to the river. A hairline drain runs down through sections 13 and 24 and fades southward; a third, unnamed stream crosses the Township 36 tier eastward and exits at the southeast. No creek on the plate is lettered by name; only the river is. The roads are the section-line grid, complete, with two diagonals that break it: one unlettered road running southeast from the town through sections 21, 22, 26 and 25 and out of the township at its southeast, and a second diagonal along the Township 36 tier. One railroad is drawn built and solid — the L. S. & M. S. R. R., east–west through Osceola and the town. A second is drawn dashed and lettered as a projection: the "Chicago & Lake Huron Rail Road," crossing the north-center sections diagonally toward the town — a railroad on paper in 1875, printed as one. What the plate does not draw is as much a part of its testimony. The great marsh — Chapman's marsh, Howard's La Salle swamp, the ground the banked text calls the foundation fact of the township's farming — is not drawn as marsh anywhere on the plate. Its ground, in sections 13, 24 and 25, appears as ordinary farm parcels, only larger and less subdivided than the township's average — the Fultzler, Towle and Grimes holdings above — with the drain crossing it as a fading hairline. The plate carries no timber or woodland marks, no creamery, cheese factory or dairy mark of any kind, and no mint: 1875 predates the mint district by a generation.

Osceola on the plate

The township's one village is drawn as a shaded block astride the L. S. & M. S. where Baugo Creek crosses it, in section 16. Above the village the Bancroft estate's ground fronts the creek, with a building square drawn at the creek-and-rail crossing and the word "Mill" partially legible beside it — the plate prints the mill at exactly that strength, and it is printed here at that strength. Z. Bancroft's parcels and "R. H. Bancroft 40" adjoin the estate ground; J. Boles, 94 acres, W. Woodside, 121.75, and J. W. Leonard, 160 round out the village's farm frame. The plat draws no mill at the Mishawaka bend — the town's mills are on the town plates — so the township plate's mill record is this one creek-side mark at Osceola.

The church and school marks

The plate letters one church by name: "Bap. Ch.," with a cross-topped glyph, at the south line of J. Bucheit's section 33 land. A second church glyph, of the same cross-topped form but lettered with no name, stands at the corner where sections 27, 28, 33 and 34 meet. The schools are drawn as district marks, never named: a small lot lettered "3." inside W. Cook's 80.08 acres in section 26, with a steepled house glyph at J. Cook's corner on the section 26 and 35 line, and a small boxed "5" in section 4 of the Township 36 tier. Two further house glyphs — at E. Fuller's in the Range 2 East strip and at J. Fulmer's in the Township 36 tier — read as farmstead marks and are not claimed as anything more.

The atlas's own Penn sketch, cross-checked against its plat

The left-hand page of the spread carries the atlas's own short sketch of Penn Township, and its settlement list substantially matches the Chapman list the banked text prints: the Moats brothers on section 17 about 1828, Holt on section 5 in 1829, and the 1830–31 wave — Skinner, Cottrell (the county's first elected sheriff), Bell on section 7, Huntsinger on section 5, Ebler and Macy on section 18, the Buyrkits on section 17, Curtis on section 16, the Irelands on section 8, West on section 9. The plate and the sketch verify each other at the Hollingsheads: the sketch seats the Hollingshead family on sections 23 and 26, and the plat draws the Hollingshead block on exactly those two sections. The Buyrkit name persists on the plat as "G. T. Byrkit 59.24" at the river bend. One check runs the other way and is printed at its strength: the plat shows no Moat on section 17 in 1875 — its owners there are W. Griffiths, J. Boles, D. Vroman, A. Washburne and J. Baldwin. Forty-seven years stand between the Moats' 1828 location and the plate; the absence is expected, and no conflict is claimed from it.

Elam Eller's acres: two witnesses, printed whole

The banked text, on Chapman's biographical sketch, gives Elam Eller of section 29 as owner in 1880 of 250 acres. The 1875 plat, five years earlier, draws E. Eller on section 29 with about 109 acres in the parcels lettered to his name. The name and the section agree — the identification of Chapman's stock farmer with the peppermint account's probable first grower stands on the same ground the banked text gave it — but the acreage does not: 109 acres drawn in 1875 against 250 printed in 1880. A purchase between the plate and the history would explain the growth, and no record of one is in hand; the two figures are printed here whole, each with its date and its witness, and no reconciliation is asserted. The correction this forces is one of company, not of text: Chapman's 250 acres no longer stands alone as the township record of Eller's holding.

Aaron Jones and the empty section

The banked text's farmers'-institutions anchor rests on Chapman's sketch: Aaron Jones, resident on section 32 of Penn Township on a farm of over 400 acres, master of the Indiana State Grange in 1880, credited by Howard with the mastership of the National Grange as well. The 1875 plat shows no Jones on section 32. Its owners there are I. Bush, 160 acres; D. Mallett, 180; W. Beer, 60; J. Cook, 10; and W. Rogers, 10 — and no parcel lettered to a Jones is verified anywhere on the plate. Five years separate the plate from Chapman's sketch, and a man may assemble 400 acres in five years; but the assembly itself is documented by no witness in hand, and the plate's silence is total where the sketch is specific. Both are printed whole: Chapman's Jones, on section 32 with his Granges, stands as Chapman's testimony, and the plat's section 32 — Bush, Mallett, Beer, Cook and Rogers, and no Jones — stands beside it. No reconciliation is asserted, and the masterships, which rest on Chapman and Howard alone, are not touched by the plate either way.

The 1930 table: its frame, and the missing page

The second pull was the Fifteenth Census's township table — Agriculture, Volume I: Farm Acreage and Farm Values by Townships or Other Minor Civil Divisions — the Indiana pamphlet of 1930–31 as bound into the volume, its table titled "Number of Farms, Farm Acreage, and Specified Farm Values, by Counties and Minor Civil Divisions: 1930." The table's own headings, read first-hand from the Indiana pages that flank the county's, fix what the table is: for every county and township, the number of farms at April 1, 1930; all land in farms, in acres, classified according to its use in 1929 — crop land, divided into crops harvested, crop failure, and idle or fallow; pasture land, divided into plowable, woodland, and all other; woodland not used for pasture; and all other land in farms — and four columns of specified farm values at April 1, 1930, in dollars: farm land and buildings; all farm buildings; farmers' dwellings; and farm implements and machinery. The table carries no tenure columns and no crop or livestock columns at township level; tenure and the crops stand at county level in the later volumes. The Census Bureau's digital copy of the volume — the scan of record, mirrored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's archive — passes directly from printed page 178, which ends with Randolph County, to printed page 180, which opens with Steuben County. Printed page 179, which carries St. Joseph County entire — the county line and all thirteen townships, Penn among them — is missing from the scan, and a page-by-page sweep of the whole chapter file finds it nowhere else. The row exists in the printed volume; its place is fixed by the pages on both sides of the gap; but no Penn Township figure from the 1930 table is printed in this history, because none has been read from the table itself, and a transcription compiled from the table by other hands is not the table.