Major Donations in Mishawaka: The Lilly Line, the Era Ladder, and the Ranked Table

The Lilly Line, the Era Ladder, and the Ranked Table

Mishawaka has no standalone donations fragment; its major giving has stood scattered through the charities, nonprofits and wealth files of this history, each gift at the size of the article that happened to hold it. This addendum gathers the three things that scattering could not show. First, the course of one outside giver — Lilly Endowment Inc. of Indianapolis — into Mishawaka institutions, dug from the Endowment's own published grant record and printed whole at the size that record gives it, which is thinner and more recent than the neighboring cities' Lilly courses. No figure in the second and third articles is new; the first article's figures are the Endowment's own.

The Lilly Endowment line, whole: a thin, recent course into one university and two school districts

The test was run against the Endowment's own record, as the leg requires: the grants listings and initiative lists published at lillyendowment.org, read for every grantee seated in Mishawaka — Bethel University, the Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library, the City of Mishawaka, the two school corporations and their foundations, and the county community foundation's Mishawaka funds at their strength. The course that record returns is real but narrow, and it is printed at its true size: in the Endowment's published record reached for this addendum, Mishawaka's Lilly money runs almost entirely to one small university, in the present decade, for religion, reading and youth — not to the library, not to the city, and not to the health system. A thin course prints thin, with the search shown.

The largest single grant in the course is Bethel University's. In March 2025 the Endowment approved a grant of $1,245,748 to Bethel University, Mishawaka, through its Nurturing Children Through Worship and Prayer Initiative, to establish the Nurturing Childhood Faith Through the Arts program — Bethel's own announcement of 7 April 2025 gives the same figure and the same purpose, and names Bethel one of 170 organizations funded through the initiative's three rounds since 2022. It is the largest Lilly Endowment grant to a Mishawaka-seated institution in the record reached, and it is a religion-program grant to a church-related university: the Endowment's Mishawaka course begins, at its top, in its oldest field.

The second grant in size is also Bethel's, and also programmatic. Through the Endowment's Charting the Future for Indiana's Colleges and Universities initiative, Bethel University received an implementation grant of $1,000,000 — one of the implementation grants made to all thirty-eight Indiana colleges and universities in the initiative's second round, sized by enrollment, following planning grants made in December 2019. The Endowment's published list places the grant exactly: "Bethel University, Mishawaka, $1,000,000." The third is Bethel's again: $499,375 through the Advancing the Science of Reading in Indiana initiative, announced in the university's magazine in spring 2024, to redevelop Bethel's literacy curriculum, provide professional development for its literacy faculty, and open a new literacy center — the BU Center for Literacy — serving the university's teacher-preparation program and K-12 teachers in the Mishawaka area as a community resource.

Below those three, the Endowment's own recent-grants listing, as published in November 2026, carries two further Bethel grants at their listed strength: $125,000 as an artificial-intelligence-in-higher-education planning grant, and $91,020 through Indiana Youth Programs on Campus, Round II. The listing gives amounts and program names; it does not narrate either grant, and neither is enlarged here. Together with the three grants above, Bethel's documented Lilly course in the record reached totals $2,961,143 across five grants, every one of them made in the 2020s, every one of them for the work of a small Christian university — worship and prayer, institutional planning, reading instruction, artificial-intelligence planning, and youth programs on campus. No Lilly grant to Bethel from any earlier decade appears in the Endowment's published record reached; the course as published is a present-decade course, and it is printed as one.

The school corporations' course is earlier and smaller. In the first phase of the Endowment's Comprehensive Counseling Initiative for Indiana K-12 Students, announced 20 January 2017, planning grants went to 284 Indiana public school corporations and charter schools, ranging from $8,302 to $50,000 by enrollment. The Endowment's published recipient list names, under Mishawaka, both of the city's corporations: the Penn-Harris-Madison School Corporation and the School City of Mishawaka. Penn-Harris-Madison's own published account fixes its planning grant at $50,000 — the initiative's ceiling — and records that P-H-M filed independently but planned to collaborate with the School City of Mishawaka and the South Bend Community School Corporation on planning and implementation. The School City of Mishawaka's individual planning-grant amount does not appear in the Endowment's published list reached, which names recipients without individual amounts for this phase beyond the announced range; it prints here as named, amount unpublished. Whether either corporation won a competitive implementation grant in the initiative's second phase does not appear in the record reached for this addendum, and no implementation figure is stated.

The rest of the test returns negatives, and they print as findings. No grant to the Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library appears in the Endowment's published grant record reached — the library's documented outside foundation grant in this build's record is of another house entirely, the Gates Foundation's $14,275 of June 2001 to expand public access to computers and the Internet, carried in the libraries record. No grant to the City of Mishawaka as a grantee appears. No grant to the Saint Joseph health system or its foundation appears at Mishawaka's seat. And the county community foundation's Lilly course — the Endowment's Giving Indiana Funds for Tomorrow grants to the Community Foundation of St. Joseph County and the Lilly Endowment Community Scholarships it administers for the county, four offered for 2024 on the foundation's own announcement — runs to a South Bend corporation and is boundary at exactly that strength: it is the pooled vehicle's course, printed whole in South Bend's donations record, and Mishawaka students and funds share in it as county residents, as the nonprofits file of this build already carries the foundation's Mishawaka holders and its grants back into Mishawaka buildings. What is Mishawaka's own, in the Endowment's own record, is the five Bethel grants and the two school planning grants above — $2,961,143 to the university, $50,000 published to one school corporation and an unpublished amount to the other. That is the whole of the line as the Endowment publishes it, and the addendum does not borrow the twin city's larger Lilly course to thicken it.

The era ladder: the gift each era called the largest, in sequence

The ladder is a synthesis of banked facts; every rung stands in an owning fragment of this build, cited at each step, and no new figure is introduced. Its shape is the finding: Mishawaka's largest gifts grow by orders of magnitude across a century and a half, but they change kind as they grow — from a manufacturer's matching check that founded an institution, to a national philanthropist's standard grant matched with a local man's land, to a widow's bequest that endowed a house, to a car dealer's million given in his lifetime to a university across the river, to a family foundation's two and a half million, to a dealer family's giving carried not as one gift but as a published annual course.

The first rung is 1882, and it is small money with a large structure. Palmer C. Perkins of the Perkins Windmill Company donated $2,000 to establish an orphanage in Mishawaka, provided the town would contribute the same amount; the St. Joseph County Woman's Christian Temperance Union acted on the offer within weeks, and the St. Joseph County Orphans Home opened in July 1882 (Charities, "The temperance women and the windmill money"). The gift's size is the era's: two thousand dollars, doubled by subscription, was the largest documented founding gift of Mishawaka's benevolent era — and its form, an industrialist's match offered to a women's society, set the pattern of the city's giving for a generation.

The second rung is 1916, and it pairs outside money with local ground. Mishawaka's Carnegie library rose on two lots at First and Hill Streets donated by Frederick George Eberhart, a block from the Ball Band plant, with a $30,000 grant from Andrew Carnegie's library program, to A. F. Wickes's design, opening 5 May 1916 (Great Fortunes, "Frederick George Eberhart"; the building's whole course in Libraries). Thirty thousand dollars of a national philanthropist's money — fifteen times the Perkins match — was the largest single gift into a Mishawaka institution of its era, and the era's characteristic form is the pairing: the check came from New York, the land from a Mishawaka manufacturer.

The third rung is a bequest, and it prices a fortune at its end. Susie Beiger, widow of Martin V. Beiger, the woolen and rubber manufacturer the record calls Mishawaka's first millionaire, willed $210,000 of her $1.55 million estate to a fund for the maintenance of the Beiger Mansion and its furnishings — the mansion's own published history gives those figures; the South Bend Tribune's 2006 account of the same will gives the estate at $1.5 million and the designated sum at $200,000, and both statements stand unmerged, as Great Fortunes carries them ("The Beiger Descent: A Widow's $1.55 Million, Willed to a House"). The house opened on 1 February 1930 as the Beiger Home for the Elderly and operated until 1967. A bequest of $210,000 — or $200,000, as the paper prints it — was the largest documented gift of the interwar city, and its recipient was characteristic of its era too: not a program but a building, endowed to stand.

The fourth rung is 2000, and it crosses the river. In October 2000 the University of Notre Dame announced a gift of $1,000,000 from Jordan H. Kapson, chairman of the board of The Jordan Automotive Group of Mishawaka, to establish an endowed professorship in Jewish studies — the Jordan H. Kapson Chair in Jewish Studies (Great Fortunes, "Jordan H. Kapson: The Dealer Fortune, Priced by Its Gift"). The wealth file's judgment stands as this ladder's: it remains the largest single published gift by a Mishawaka fortune to any institution in the record reached at its banking — a dealer's million, given in his own name, in his lifetime, to a university in the twin city, because that is where the chair could stand.

The fifth rung belongs to the family-foundation era. The Garatoni-Smith Family Foundation — seated in Mishawaka at 4215 Edison Lakes Parkway, founded 2007 on the Garatoni Family Office's own account, with register assets of $51,949,068, the largest charitable fortune seated in Mishawaka in the nonprofits file's register — gave $2,500,000 to Ivy Tech, which named its Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Automation for Larry and Judy Garatoni (Foundations & Nonprofits, "The Garatoni-Smith Family Foundation"). The center stands on Ivy Tech's South Bend–Elkhart ground, not Mishawaka's; the gift is Mishawaka money at foundation scale, printed with the recipient's seat stated, as the boundary discipline requires. A conflict the digging for this addendum surfaced is printed whole rather than merged: a second Garatoni gift of $2,500,000 to Ivy Tech, announced in July 2022, named the Garatoni School of Entrepreneurship & Innovation at the college's Evansville campus.

The top rung is not a gift but a course, and that is the present era's form. The Leep Automotive Family Foundation, founded in 2011, publishes its own ledger in the Gurley Leep Automotive Family's Annual Giving Report: $5,555,084 in foundation grants awarded since founding, and combined family and company charitable giving of $5,771,987 in 2024 alone, of which $1,094,744 was foundation grant funding (Great Fortunes, "The Leep Family"; Foundations & Nonprofits, "The Leep Foundation"). Its Mishawaka instances stand in the charities file at their projects' strength — the Leep Maternity Home within Hannah's House of Michiana's continuum, and the $150,000 Leep Family Foundation sponsorship of the $300,000 Homes of Hope house built with Habitat for Humanity of St. Joseph County in 2025. The ladder thus ends where the record ends: the largest documented Mishawaka giving of the present era is a dealer family's published annual course in the millions, larger in a single year than every earlier rung combined, and printed — as the whole ladder is — only at the strength of its own publication.

The ranked table close: every documented major gift, ranked

Amounts are as the owning records publish them; where a record publishes no amount, the amount prints as unpublished, and where a record publishes two amounts for one gift, both print. Annual totals and cumulative courses are labeled as what they are and are not ranked as single gifts; they stand at the table's head in their own class because their size is the record's fact. Gifts of land and buildings whose value the record does not price print at the foot, amount unpublished, in date order. The recipient's seat is stated wherever it is not Mishawaka's, so that no gift is absorbed across the boundary in either direction.

Below the table's floor the record continues at smaller sizes in the owning files — the United Way's $10,000 leadership gift to the Mishawaka Education Foundation booked in 2020–21, the Kiwanis and Lions scholarships at $750, the Laidig Holy-Land Study Grants at up to $2,000 — and they stand there at their strength; a ranked table of major gifts does not promote them, and their absence here is the table's floor, not the record's silence. What the table shows, read as a whole, is the ladder's lesson in columns: Mishawaka's documented major giving is real, dated and ranked, and its largest single gifts have repeatedly been made by Mishawaka money to institutions seated across a boundary — a chair at Notre Dame, a center at Ivy Tech, pooled grants through a South Bend foundation — while the gifts that stayed home built the city's own ground floor: an orphans' home, a library's land, a golf course, a mansion's trust, a parks foundation, a food pantry, and a small university's programs. Both directions are the record, and the table prints both.