The bankers — a paper bank, one charter, and Darwin Wiekamp

the paper bank organized 1854 · the First National chartered at the turn of 1900–01 · the West End bank established 5 June 1920

The founders the record does not name: Mishawaka's banking spine is one institution, and its founding officers are not in the record this build has reached. A Bank of Mishawaka was organized under Indiana's free-banking law in 1854 and its notes were engraved by the American Bank Note Company — and the bank never opened; it survives as proof notes, and no organizer's name stands in the numismatic record that carries it. The First National Bank of Mishawaka, charter No. 5167 in the Comptroller's list, lent to the city for eighty-two years, came through the Depression whole — an acquirer of a failed trust company's deposits in 1932, not a casualty — and merged into South Bend's 1st Source on 25 March 1983 with $126.9 million in deposits. Its presidents across those eighty-two years do not stand in the record reached; the officers the record does name are a state-level president — Fred J. Hums, of Mishawaka, president of the Indiana Bankers Association for 1951 — and an exported chief: Donald B. Smith Sr., the First National's executive vice president, who left in 1946 to become the founding president of Kokomo's First National Bank, on the Howard County Historical Society's record. The charter's own officer roster waits on Pollock's monograph for charter 5167 and the Comptroller's annual reports, named in the closing entry.

Wiekamp — the buyer who became the founder: The West End State Bank was established on 5 June 1920, on the FDIC's institution record, in the Belgian and Italian neighborhoods of the West End — its organizers likewise unnamed in the record reached. Its founder in effect was the man who bought it. Darwin Wiekamp was a Mishawaka man who had begun at the Associates Corporation of South Bend in September 1945; in the 1960s — the Indiana University South Bend commencement biography that is the narrative carrier dates the partnership's "monumental step" to 1966 — Wiekamp and his partner purchased the West End State Bank and renamed it Valley Bank, afterward Valley American Bank & Trust Company. The partner's name is not carried by the biography, and is not supplied here. Under Wiekamp the neighborhood bank became the region's: resources of $541,755,000 with twenty locations at 30 September 1990, assets reaching $1 billion on the biography's record, and on 1 October 1983 the Mishawaka bank absorbed South Bend's American National Bank & Trust — the West End's bank swallowing a downtown South Bend charter. The succession from Valley American runs on the FDIC record through National City to PNC Bank on 6 November 2009, where the charter line remains; the downtown Mishawaka building came down in 2024 for a hospital center. The banker's fortune is the Wealth section's; his size here is the course: a Mishawaka-born banker whose institution, not the First National, became the region's largest home-grown bank of its generation.

Sources:

1. Businesses & Banks — the banks lineage whole: "The Bank of Mishawaka" (the 1854 organization and the bank that never opened, on the numismatic record); "The First National Bank of Mishawaka" (charter No. 5167 on the OCC list; the 1932 assumption and the RFC subscription; Fred J. Hums on the Indiana Bankers Association roster; Donald B. Smith Sr.'s course to Kokomo on the Howard County Historical Society's record; the merger of 25 March 1983 at $126.9 million in deposits); "West End State Bank to Valley American" (the FDIC establishment date of 5 June 1920; the IUSB biography of Darwin Wiekamp — the Associates start of September 1945, the 1966 purchase with his partner, the renaming; the 1990 resources; the $1 billion assets; the 1983 absorption; the FDIC succession to PNC, 6 November 2009; the 2024 demolition).