The face with no original

1932 · AN INVENTED LIKENESS

Every city history has a face it cannot verify; Mishawaka's cannot have existed: The woman the city is named for stands in bronze at Lincoln Park, and generations of Mishawakans have known her by that figure — the beautiful, graceful, athletic maiden of the monument's tablet. The portrait question, asked of her the way it is asked of any famous face — what did she actually look like, and how close is the image to the sitting? — dissolves on inspection, and the manner of its dissolving is this entry. She had no sitting. The documentary record gives her no existence outside the 1875 novel that invented her: no portrait was painted, no photograph taken, no description written by anyone who saw her, because there was no one to see. The Fort Wayne section of this history carries the harder-luck version of this class — a real chief whose one true portrait burned in 1814, leaving copies of a copy. Mishawaka's is the rarer case: not a likeness whose original was lost, but a likeness with no original at all, modeled a century and a half after the fact from a novelist's sentences.

What is known is the image's pedigree as an artifact. The figure was erected in 1932 for the city's centennial season, on the Daughters of the American Revolution's boulder, with the Lions Club's tablet, by the citizens of Mishawaka; the tablet still stands legible on the riverwalk, photographed for the Historical Marker Database in May 2024, and it nowhere says the woman came out of a book. No account reached for this record names the statue's sculptor or a model. The face, then, is documented exactly as far as a face can be when its subject is fiction: it is the face a city gave its own name, in bronze, in 1932 — an act of portraiture whose sitter is a sentence. The Folklore section owns the sentences; this entry owns only the bronze fact that they acquired a face, and that no file exists, or could exist, against which to check it.

Sources:

1. the Folklore section of this history — the 1932 monument, its sponsors, its tablet, and its place as the tale's second form; the 1875 novel as the tale's first and only early source.
2. Historical Marker Database, the monument's Lincoln Park entry (photographed May 2024) — the tablet's present standing and legibility.
3. the The Story of Mishawaka section of this history — the princess printed as fiction at the head of the city's story.