The ledger of losses, and the live case

The losses argued about still begin with a fire inside a save. The Beiger Mansion was listed in 1973 and gutted by an unsolved arson on 20 January 1975; what the Historical Society kept for the next fourteen years was, in the Visit bureau's plain words, limestone walls, chimneys, porcelain fixtures and safes. The restoration that followed the 1989 sale — Ron Montandon, joined by Dennis Slade in 2000, and a Beiger Mansion Preservation Trust in the present day — is a rebuilding inside a shell, and the mansion that operates now as an inn is the movement's first victory and its first ruin in one address. The Tivoli stands in Controversies and in the marker entry above. The third standing loss is quieter: the Ball-Band works, the factory complex from which the city grew, was razed by the city's own plan at the century's turn — fifty-eight buildings, 1.7 million square feet, demolition running August 1999 to August 2000 on a $10 million estimate — with a labour monument on the riverbank as the ground's memorial. No preservation fight over the works appears in the record reached; the businesses record owns the complex's course, and this ledger prints the demolition's scale and the absence of a fight at the same size, because both are the fact.

The live case is the foundry. On 19 June 2025 the Indiana State Historic Preservation Office wrote, in a Section 106 consultation on federal brownfields money, that the Dodge Manufacturing Company / RMG Foundry complex at 500 South Union Street — developed about 1878 as Dodge's sawmill and factory, operating until 2006 — "meets the criteria of eligibility for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places" under Criterion A for industry and Criterion C as good examples of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industrial buildings. The same letter records the city's plan: asbestos abatement with federal funds, then demolition of the buildings with city funds, and affordable housing on the site — and warns that if the abatement is part of the demolition project, the whole may be subject to Section 106 review whatever funds pay for which part. Announced and accomplished are separate here by construction: as of the record reached in November 2026, the eligibility is determined, the abatement is funded, the demolition is planned and planned only, and the buildings — on the same Union Street ground where the state put the Dodge marker in 1999 — stand. Mishawaka's preservation argument, which began with a boulder for a fictional grave, currently stands at a foundry the state says is historic and the city says is housing. This section prints the positions as the letter prints them and follows the case in the update cycle.