The Names They Brought With Them: A Test, Printed at Its Result

The immigrant place-name test · Belgian and Italian Mishawaka

The pattern tested: In some American settlements the immigrants rebuilt the old country's map in the new country's streets — a neighborhood called by a Polish hill-town's name, a district that is a transferred Warsaw — and the transferred name becomes folklore: told, explained, and pointed to on the ground. Mishawaka's two great immigrant settlements were tested for exactly that: the Flemish Belgian West End and the Calabrian Italian streets, in the neighborhoods and communities records of this history, which document both settlements street by street.

The Belgian ground: The West End's names are American and descriptive, not transferred. The settlement is carried in the record as the West End and as Belgian Town — a description of who lived there, not a Flemish place carried over — anchored on streets the plat books named before the Belgians came: West Street, Seventh Street, the Lincolnway. No Belgian town-name — no Mishawaka street or district called for a Flemish place — stands in the record reached, and no telling attaches a transferred name to the ground: the Belgians named their institutions (the parish, the BK Club of 1927 at 721 South West Street) and kept their language in them, but the map they moved into kept its American names.

The Italian ground, and the one name that is not a place-name: The Italian streets test the same way. The south-side enclave is bounded in the record by the tracks, Thirteenth, Spring and Union; the north side stands east of Main, north of Mishawaka Avenue — American street names all, worn by an Italian population without being renamed for Italy. The community's Old-World name is real, and it must be stated plainly what it is: the DiLoreto Club, the Italian-American social club founded in 1933 at 914 Division Street, takes its name from Maria SS. di Loreto — Our Lady of Loreto, the patroness of Platì, the Calabrian hometown of many of the city's Italian families — and its August celebration walked that patroness's feast in procession to St. Monica's. That is an institutional naming, a club named for a hometown's patroness; it is not a place-name, it names no street and no district, and this entry does not promote it into one to fill the pattern. Platì itself was never transferred to Mishawaka ground.

The verdict: No immigrant place-name folklore set stands for Mishawaka. The city's immigrants brought a patroness, two clubhouses, a parish life and two languages, and the record carries all of them whole in the communities file; what they did not bring, on any evidence reached, was the old country's place-names. The pattern that other settlements print as folklore is printed here as its tested absence, with the street reality stated for the one name that resembles it.

Sources:

1. This history, neighborhoods and communities records — the Belgian West End / Belgian Town and its streets (West, Seventh, the Lincolnway); the BK Club (Broederenkring, 1927) at 721 South West Street; the Italian south side (the tracks, Thirteenth, Spring, Union) and north side (east of Main, north of Mishawaka Avenue).
2. Today's Catholic (diocesan newspaper), 8 May 2019, "Violi brothers, St. Monica Parish; a legacy intertwined," as carried in the communities record — the emigration from Platì; the DiLoreto Club founded 1933, named for Maria SS. di Loreto, patroness of Platì; the August Marian procession to St. Monica.
3. DiLoreto Club (diloretoclub.com) and De Amicis Club (deamicisitalianclub.org), read November 2026 — the clubs' standing addresses, 914 Division Street and 302 West 11th Street.