Hotel Mishawaka: the grand hotel, 1909–1968

Southeast corner of Third and Main · Opened July 1909 · Demolished May 1968

In 1909 Mishawaka built the hotel it had never had, and opened it by staging itself. The Hotel Mishawaka rose at the southeast corner of Third and Main Streets, downtown's best corner. Its owner was the Mishawaka Public Improvement Corporation — the house stands in the portfolio of Melvin W. Mix, president of the Dodge Manufacturing Company, in his Coachbuilt biography, one of the public-improvement ventures of the city's leading industrialist. The given name is printed in both its forms, as the record carries them: Coachbuilt and this build's Businesses fragment give "Melvin W. Mix," born 16 November 1865, died 11 December 1927 in Chicago; Howard's roster of the Dodge Club's presidents and De Kever's account of the Mix Mansion give "Melville W. Mix." The opening was the city's self-coronation. De Kever's commissioned history tells it whole: the Historical Pageant joined the Fourth of July celebration — a canoe procession on the river, a parade of 106 floats before more than 20,000 spectators — and at noon Princess Mishawaka, played by Jennie Skelly, with Chief Elkhart, played by Frederick Eberhart, came to the hotel's front steps, where the princess raised the city flag beside the American flag and officially opened the hotel. Through the afternoon thousands walked its rooms and almost 600 took lunch or dinner; at eight that evening, from the hotel's veranda, before 5,000 people with Mayor Charles Frank presiding, the princess threw the switch that lit Mishawaka's first electric streetlights — the hotel and the modern city switched on in the same gesture. The date is printed whole, in its conflict: the commissioned history frames the celebration as the Fourth of July's, while the publisher's account of De Kever's Hidden History of Mishawaka dates "the dedication of Hotel Mishawaka" to 5 July 1909 — and 4 July 1909 fell on a Sunday, a fact of the calendar that accommodates either telling (a Sunday celebration observed on the Monday, or a weekend of both) and settles neither. The house then did a grand hotel's work for fifty-nine years. Its documented evenings stand for the rest: on 1 May 1920 General Leonard Wood, frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, spoke from a temporary podium at the hotel's front entrance on South Main — police closed a three-block radius, the Ball Band band played, Mayor Ralph W. Gaylor introduced him, and the crowd was estimated at 300, the Enterprise's account as retold in the city's modern history writing. On 21 May 1925 the Tivoli Theatre's opening night ended at the hotel, with a banquet for one hundred guests — officers, directors, stockholders, city officials, clergy and civic leaders. In May 1932 the centennial week's civic luncheon sat down at the hotel. The directories fix its working face: Bert DeVault, manager, 212 S. Main, in 1916–17, the house advertising American and European plans a block from the Lincoln Highway. The building's fabric — its stories, its room count, its cost, its architect — was not reached; the Mishawaka Enterprise's July 1909 coverage on the public library's film, Janice Bridges's 1976 history of the Princess City and De Kever's Lost Mishawaka are the named settling sources, and the gap is printed rather than filled. The end came with the civic-center renewal: "the magnificent Hotel Mishawaka was demolished in May 1968," De Kever writes, and the cleared downtown remade around it. The ground today is the downtown post office, built on the hotel's block — bounded by Third, Main, Fourth and Church Streets — and opened in June 1969. Howard's 1907 summary of the city's assets, written two years before the hotel rose, names a city hall, a theater, banks and factories and no hotel at all; the absence is the measure of what 1909 added, and 1968 took away.

Sources:

1. De Kever, The History of Mishawaka (commissioned) — the site at Third and Main, the pageant opening whole, the May 1968 demolition; read whole. The History Press, publisher's description of De Kever, Hidden History of Mishawaka (2021) — the dedication dated 5 July 1909.
2. Coachbuilt, biography of Melvin W. Mix — the Mishawaka Public Improvement Corporation's ownership of the Hotel Mishawaka; read first-hand. Howard (1907) and De Kever — the "Melville W. Mix" form; the conflict printed whole.
3. Josh Lange, on the General Wood speech of 1 May 1920, drawn from the Mishawaka Enterprise; the Tivoli opening banquet from the theatre's National Register nomination, as carried in this build's Theaters fragment; the 1932 centennial luncheon as carried in Culture.
4. Polk, Indiana Gazetteer (1916–17) — DeVault, 212 S. Main, the display advertisement. This build's Neighborhoods fragment — the post office on the hotel's block, opened June 1969.