The fiftieth year: 58,325 volumes, Penn Township, and two branches

1957 · the anniversary measure

The count: The library marked fifty years from the City Hall founding with an open house and reception on September 25, 1957, and the nomination, citing the anniversary pamphlet, fixes the institution's size at mid-century: "the library was serving a population of approximately 40,000 (including Penn Township and two branches), and by this time the stacks held over 58,325 volumes." Three facts in that sentence carry weight beyond the anniversary. Penn Township — the whole township east and south of the city, with its own school corporation — was already inside the library's served population in 1957, two decades before the State Library's legal file records the township's formal accession to the district in 1978: service ran ahead of the tax map, and the district article below prints both dates as the two records give them. And the 58,325 of 1957 is the figure against which a modern error can be seen: the 2025 News-Times feature gives the Carnegie library an opening collection in 1916 of "over 59,000 volumes." Against the documented course — 12,000 volumes in 1922, 26,166 estimated in the later 1930s, 58,325 at the fiftieth anniversary — a 59,000-volume opening in 1916 cannot stand; the feature's figure matches the anniversary count, displaced by forty-one years, and it is printed here as the conflict it is, not as a fact of 1907 or 1916.

Sources:

1. Fine, Carnegie Library nomination (1997), section 8, citing Open House and Reception in Observance of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Mishawaka Public Library, pamphlet, September 25, 1957 — the 40,000 served including Penn Township and two branches; 58,325 volumes.
2. Evans, "Pages in Transit," South Bend News-Times (2025) — the "over 59,000 volumes" opening figure, printed here as a conflict against the nomination's series.
3. Indiana State Library, Changes to Indiana Public Library Districts (updated 16 December 2023) — "Mishawaka expanded into Penn Twp. 1978," the formal accession the 1957 service anticipated.