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THE TEST, RUN FIRST · 1880 TO THE PRESENT
The question was put plainly: did Mishawaka have an amusement park or trolley park — the pleasure ground of the streetcar age, of the kind that stood all over the industrial Midwest, with rides, a midway, a dance pavilion, and a gate? The answer the record gives is no, and the search is printed here so the negative can be weighed rather than merely believed.
The city's own commissioned history, Peter J. De Kever's Mishawaka: A History, runs to some thirty thousand words across the whole life of the city and does not contain the word "amusement" once. The nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century record was read park by park in this history's parks pass, and every pleasure ground in it is accounted for at another use: Battell Park, laid out from 1879, was a landscape park of lawns, a bandstand tradition, and later a WPA rock garden and wading pool; the river grounds gave picnics, bathing, fishing, and band concerts; Merrifield Park, the city's great twentieth-century pleasure plant, was built around a swimming pool and an ice rink. Picnic groves, bathing water, and bandstands are documented in strength. A midway, a roller coaster, a carousel house, a rides plant of any kind, and a permanent commercial pleasure ground with a gate are documented nowhere. The dance-hall and ballroom side of the same question is a named gap in the culture record of this history — the settling sources are the city directories' amusement listings and the entertainment columns of the press — and it stays a gap here: no Mishawaka dance pavilion is named in the record reached either.
Two near-things were tested and are printed so they are not mistaken for the thing itself. The circus grounds were real: the city licensed circus lots, a railroad menagerie showed for a day in 1897, and the Mills Bros. Circus stood on a Mishawaka lot three times in the middle of the last century — but animals under canvas for a day are a visit, not a ground, and the whole circus record belongs to the zoo leg of this history. And at the city's east edge, Legend Park on McKinley Highway carried a petting zoo, attested in the record at visitors' strength only — a farm attraction of the automobile age, not an amusement park, and carried whole in the zoo record at that size. The permanent fairground form was tested as well: the county's fairgrounds stand in South Bend, as the fairs leg of this history records, and no fairground was ever seated in Mishawaka.
The verdict, then: negative. No amusement park, trolley park, kiddie park, pony track, or permanent pleasure ground of the gated kind ever stood in Mishawaka in the record reached. The reason is visible in the geography the rest of this record keeps meeting: the type did exist for Mishawaka children — it stood a streetcar ride away, in South Bend, and the next entry prints that boundary whole. Mishawaka's own grounds were working grounds and landscape grounds. Its children were entertained anyway, and how is the rest of this section.
Sources:
- Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History (city-commissioned history; web edition, City of Mishawaka) — read whole for this test; the word "amusement" does not occur in it.
- The culture record of this history — the dance-hall gap and its named settling sources, carried there.