The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
In 2017 the Commission built the instrument it now uses most. The city's own statement, published with the fourteenth marker in 2026, dates it exactly: "The Mishawaka Historical Marker Program was developed in 2017 to identify areas of historical significance that may not qualify as a Landmark." The programme is the Commission's own — applied for by residents, granted by the Commission, installed with ceremony — and it is deliberately lesser than a landmark designation: it regulates nothing and protects nothing, and for that reason it can go where designation cannot, including onto ground whose building is already gone. The texts the city publishes for the programme honour, in the order its marker page presents them: Allan "Rocky" Lane, the Western star born Harry Leonard Albershart; Bethel University; the Candoli brothers, Pete and Conte, the jazz trumpeters; Captain Richard Brenneman, the Vietnam prisoner of war; the Doolittle Raid and the Ball-Band fuel cells that made its range; the Elijah Powell family, the city's most prominent African American family of a century ago; Elizabeth Richardson, the Red Cross worker killed in 1945; Freddie Fitzsimmons, the knuckleballer; Irene Vergauwen, the Mishawaka dancer who became Louise Tate on Bewitched; Remo Belli, the drumhead maker; Rose Hartwick Thorpe, who wrote "Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight"; William O'Neill, the lieutenant governor; the Great Mishawaka Fire of 1872; and Margaret "Maggie" Prickett, the four-term mayor.
A count conflict stands in the record and is printed, not resolved. The city's marker page publishes the fourteen texts enumerated above. The city's news release of May 2026 announces the Tivoli marker — which is not among those fourteen texts — as "its 14th Historical Marker." Fourteen published texts plus the Tivoli make fifteen subjects for a programme on its fourteenth marker. One of the page's texts may not be a numbered marker of the series, or the count and the page may have been kept by different hands; the record reached does not say, and this account prints both numbers as the city published them and names the programme's own register as the settling source in its note.
The fourteenth marker closed the movement's longest account. On 30 September 2023, Pete De Kever — the city's Historian Laureate, president and curator of the Mishawaka Historical Museum — filed a Mishawaka Historical Marker application for the Tivoli Theatre, twenty-one years after its demolition fight began and eighteen after the building fell. On Thursday, 21 May 2026 — the 101st anniversary of the theatre's opening night — the Historic Preservation Commission installed the marker at 208 North Main Street, and the city recognized the theatre as a Historic Property. The fight itself stands whole in Controversies: the city bought the theatre, its preservation commission voted 6–1 to recommend interim protection in 2004, the council's vote on that protection is absent from the record reached, and the redevelopment department demolished the building on 2 February 2005. What belongs to this section is the aftermath's shape. The theatre that Mishawaka's preservation law could not save alive, Mishawaka's preservation programme kept on the record dead — by the same commission, at the same address, in a ceremony timed to the building's birthday. The marker programme's defenders can call that the system working at the strength it has; its critics can call it marking as a substitute for saving. The record carries both readings in its facts and adopts neither; it notes only that the fourteenth marker is the first in the series whose subject the marker's own installer had demolished.