Flour first: the mill-race ground the food trade started on

1834 — 1868 · the two races and Main Street

The first tables were a hotel's and a tavern's: The village of St. Joseph Iron Works fed travelers before it fed itself in any documented form. Orlando Hurd opened the Mishawaka Hotel in 1834, and "the traveling public were furnished with ample entertainment in the wilderness of the St. Joseph Valley," as the 1875 county atlas puts it; the first preaching in the settlement was held in a tavern kept by Mr. Finch, the same atlas records. The first food manufacture followed within a year: in 1835 Asa Taylor built a flouring mill, and flour became one of the village's shipped products — by the late 1850s flour stands in Ward Baker's Indiana Magazine of History account among the articles Mishawaka manufactured and sent to outside markets, and the city-commissioned history counts a distillery and a flour mill among the industries lining the two races in the 1840s. Until 1857, that history also records, livestock roamed the streets freely, and the town board's anti-hog ordinance of that year is the young village's first food law of any kind.

The trade in the 1868 directory: The 1868 business directory of St. Joseph County gives the mature form of the mill-race food economy in three lines. Under Flouring Mills it lists three houses: Judson A.B. & Co.'s Mishawaka Flouring Mill at the foot of Mill Street; the Ripple Flouring Mill, A. Eberhart & Co., proprietors, on the south Race at the foot of Main; and the St. Joseph Flouring Mill, Coon & Bros., on the north Race. The Eberhart of the Ripple mill is Adolphus Eberhart, whose flouring-mill course precedes the woolen and rubber company in the Ball Band record, and it is not retold here. The directory's hotel is the Milbur House, U.S. Dodge proprietor, at Main and Second; its meat trade stands at two storefronts — Burt J.A. & Co. on Second and Valentine Shroth on Main. Grain in, flour out, meat at retail, and a hotel table at the center of town: that is the whole of Mishawaka's food record at directory size, and no market house stands in it — a negative the markets entry below takes up whole.

Sources:

1. An Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Joseph Co., Indiana (Higgins, Belden & Co., 1875) — Orlando Hurd's Mishawaka Hotel of 1834; the first preaching in Finch's tavern; Asa Taylor's flouring mill of 1835.
2. Peter J. De Kever, "Mishawaka: A History" (city-commissioned history, City of Mishawaka) — the distillery and flour mill among the race industries of the 1840s; the anti-hog ordinance of 1857.
3. Ward Baker, "Mishawaka on the Eve of Conflict," Indiana Magazine of History — flour among the articles manufactured and shipped to outside markets by the late 1850s.
4. Business Directory of St. Joseph County, 1868 (as transcribed) — the three flouring mills (Judson; Ripple, A. Eberhart & Co.; St. Joseph, Coon & Bros.); the Milbur House hotel; the meat markets of Burt and Shroth.
5. Ball Band section of this history — Adolphus Eberhart's flouring-mill course before the woolen company, pointed to and not retold.