Finch's tavern and the small stands

Mishawaka · The tavern era's remainder · Undated–1850s

Two more stands survive at a sentence apiece, and they are printed at that size. The 1875 county atlas records that the first preaching in the settlement was held in a tavern kept by Mr. Finch — the house unnamed, the year unstated, the congregation the same one that would worship in Earl's Tavern in 1834; which stand came first the atlas does not say. Leeper's hotel reminiscences carry the second: John Bert — the name also prints as Beard — "for many years kept a similar house in Mishawaka," a boarding house, his sister Margaret keeping the better-documented stand of the same kind in South Bend. A brother and sister boarding travelers on both banks of the river is the whole of the fact, and it is a true measure of the early trade: beyond Hurd's hotel, Mishawaka's first lodging was a scatter of taverns and boarding houses kept in dwelling houses, named in passing and gone. The directories, when they begin, count one hotel; the small stands were never the directories' kind of business, and no roster of them can be honestly built from what survives.

Sources:

1. Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Joseph County (1875) — the first preaching in Finch's tavern, as carried in this build's Food fragment.
2. Leeper's reminiscences in Howard (1907), vol. 1 — John Bert (or Beard) keeping a boarding house in Mishawaka "for many years"; his sister Margaret's South Bend house is the contrast in South Bend's Hotels & Motels.