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Mishawaka counted itself early, and the count is documented in a federal file. The National Register nomination for the Ellis–Schindler House carries a letter of the period stating that on 29 August 1979 the City of Mishawaka was "one of the first Indiana cities to complete its inventory of historic sites and structures." The house itself — built about 1834, the oldest known existing structure in the city, moved a block west in the twentieth century and restored in 1979 — was one of thirteen historic buildings the letter counts in the Lincoln Park–Lincolnway West–Kamm Brewery neighbourhood alone. The inventory was the state programme's local arm, the Indiana Historic Sites and Structures Inventory, and it gave Mishawaka what preservation runs on: a rated list. Buildings in the inventory carry the survey's judgments — Outstanding, Notable, Contributing in the programme's vocabulary — and those ratings, not any landmark ordinance, are what Mishawaka's later fights cite.
The inventory's printed monument is the report of 1995. The City of Mishawaka Summary Report of the Indiana Historic Sites and Structures Inventory, copyrighted 1995, is credited jointly to the City of Mishawaka Historic Review Board and the Beiger Heritage Corporation — a city body and the private preservation corporation working the survey together, the partnership that runs through this whole account. The report's ratings had legal-adjacent force in practice: when, in 2006, the owners of the building on the northeast corner of Main and East First Streets sought to demolish it for an unannounced development, the hearing the city held on 13 June 2006 was required, the Tribune reported, because the building stood listed as a "notable structure" in the 1995 summary report. A survey rating, in Mishawaka, was enough to make a demolition wait for a public hearing. What the hearing decided is not in the record reached; the gap is named in this section's note.
The survey's second printed product was a district on paper. In February 2000, Beiger Heritage printed the Beiger East–Multi Site Historic District — a photographic archive of portions of the city's east side, held, the Tribune reported in 2010, in the Heritage Room of the Mishawaka–Penn–Harris Public Library, and described in that account as the last photo archive of portions of the city on record. A multi-site district assembled as photographs and documentation is a preservation instrument of a particular kind: it designates nothing and regulates nothing, but it fixes the evidence from which a designation could later be argued. The city's own present count of "three multi-site districts" is printed in the machinery entry below; whether the Beiger East district is one of the three is not stated in the record reached, and the question is carried as an assembly flag in this section's note, not resolved here.