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The first preservation instrument Mishawaka ever used was a boulder. During Centennial Week in May 1932 — the celebration itself stands whole in this history's Culture account — the Daughters of the American Revolution dedicated a boulder and bronze plaque in Lincoln Park at the supposed grave of Princess Mishawaka, before a crowd the city's commissioned history puts at a thousand people. The princess is a figure of Flavius J. Littlejohn's 1875 story collection, and no document of the village's time carries her burial; the Story of Mishawaka section of this record tests the tale whole and prints the record against it. What belongs here is the act: in 1932, in the worst year of the Depression, Mishawaka's first documented act of public keeping was a marker, placed by a private patriotic society, for a grave the record does not support. The city has been marking first and verifying as it goes ever since, and the boulder still stands as the marker program's ancestor in fact if not in law.
The state's turn came in a single year. In 1968 the Indiana Historical Bureau placed four markers in Mishawaka at once — the First Dam Across the St. Joseph River and its Power Race, the First Bridge, the Mishawaka Academic and Normal Institute, and the St. Joseph Iron Works — a cluster that marked the city's founding industries and its first school all in one season. The markers are enumerated whole in this section's state-marker entry below. Their arrival predates any Mishawaka preservation body: the state marked the iron works and the dam while the buildings of the factory age still stood in daily use around them, and no local machinery yet existed to do anything with the marking.
The first save was private, and it was the mansion. By 1972 the empty Beiger Mansion at 317 Lincolnway East — Martin and Susie Beiger's house, completed in the first decade of the century — was slated for demolition to make way for a used-car lot. The local community, with the Mishawaka Historical Society, banded together to save and restore it, and the house was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. The society's course with the mansion — the fire of 20 January 1975 that gutted it, the long underfunded restoration, the sale of 1 August 1989 — stands at museum size in this history's Museums account and is carried here at the anchor size the shared record allows: it was Mishawaka's preservation movement before the movement had an address, proof that the will to keep existed in the city two decades before the city gave it a commission. It also set the pattern the next fifty years would repeat: in Mishawaka, the keeping has usually been done by named private hands — a society, a corporation, one historian — with the city's machinery arriving after.