The Mishawaka Hotel: Hurd's house of 1834

Mishawaka · Vistula Road · Autumn 1834

The town's first hotel was the founder's own, and for a generation it was the road's best address. Howard's county history states it in one sentence: "During the year 1834, Orlando Hurd opened a hotel for the accommodation of the traveling public." Peter J. De Kever's commissioned history of the city gives the season and the standing: "In the autumn, Orlando Hurd constructed the Mishawaka Hotel, which became known as the best hotel on the Vistula Road between Chicago and Toledo." The village was bisected by that road — the region's major east–west route, Toledo to Chicago by way of the St. Joseph valley — and a good house on it drew the wagon and stage traffic of two states. The 1875 county atlas remembered the accommodation in the language of the frontier: "the traveling public were furnished with ample entertainment in the wilderness of the St. Joseph Valley." The house was also the settlement's civic room before it had one: the elections that organized the town — ordered September 1834, held 31 January 1835 — were conducted at the house of Orlando Hurd. How long the hotel traded, under whom, and what became of the building, the record reached does not say; even its site is carried only at road strength — on the Vistula Road, no lot or corner named — so no ground-now line can be honestly written for it. the house's later course is a named gap, and the next named stand in the record is the Milburn's. Hurd himself is the Story of Mishawaka section's subject; the hotel is his second founding, a year behind the furnace.

Sources:

1. Howard, History of St. Joseph County (1907), vol. 1, p. 324 — the 1834 opening; the incorporation elections at Hurd's house; read first-hand.
2. De Kever, The History of Mishawaka, the city's commissioned history — the autumn construction and the "best hotel on the Vistula Road" standing; read whole at the City of Mishawaka's site.
3. Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Joseph County (1875) — "ample entertainment in the wilderness of the St. Joseph Valley," as carried in this build's Food fragment.