The 1875 illustrated atlas: Mishawaka's own plates

Higgins, Belden & Co., Chicago, 1875 — An Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Joseph Co., Indiana

Twelve years after the inset, the subscription atlas gave Mishawaka four spreads of its own. The atlas's title page states its method and its makers in one line: "Compiled Drawn & Published from Personal Examinations & Surveys, Higgins Belden & Co, Lakeside Building, Clark & Adams Sts., Chicago, 1875." Its own index — read in full from the atlas's text — assigns the town the place the inset never could. The county map opens the volume at page 2. The town itself is drawn twice, as the river divides it: "Mishawaka (south part), Plat of" at pages 72 and 73, and "Mishawaka (north part), Plat of" at pages 78 and 79. Penn Township, the township that holds the city and most of its future growth, has its own plate at pages 86 and 87. The "History of Mishawaka" stands at page 17, and the county directory's "Mishawaka and Penn Township" listings run at pages 60, 66, 76, 82, and 84 — the names keyed, in the atlas trade's manner, to the landowner geography the plates draw.

These plates are the earliest full town plan of Mishawaka to survive in print, and their evidentiary standing follows from the trade that made them. A subscription atlas was compiled from personal examination and survey, as the title page claims, but it was sold by subscription, and its views, portraits, and biographies were paid placements — the model the South Bend maps file states plainly for the same volume: the maps are evidence, the views are advertising. The Mishawaka plats therefore testify strongly to what a surveyor walking the town in 1875 found worth ruling into lines: the street grid on both banks, the lot and landowner framework, the mill and factory ground at the rapids, the township's farm parcels and their owners' names. They testify weakly, by design, to prominence: the views index lists the Mishawaka brewing firm of Dick & Kamm at page 77, inside the Mishawaka plate sequence — a firm's purchased presence in the volume, evidence of its standing and its wish to be seen, not a neutral ranking of the town's industries. Read with that discipline, the 1875 plates are the foundation document of Mishawaka's drawn record: every later city map is, in part, an argument with them.

The volume runs to 116 pages in the cataloging of the county map-records inventory. Its modern life is unusually accessible. The Indiana State Library holds it in the Indiana collection (IR912.772 S143at) with a microfilm copy in the AGLL county-atlas series (Reel 13), and holds as well the 1986 reprint issued by Selby Publishing of Kokomo — the reprint through which many readers meet the atlas today. The plates a researcher needs are the same in every copy: pages 72–73, 78–79, and 86–87.

Sources:

1. An Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Joseph Co., Indiana (Higgins, Belden & Co., Chicago, 1875): title page and the atlas's own index to maps, plats, views, and directory, read in full from the volume's text at the Internet Archive.
2. Indiana State Library, St. Joseph County maps list: the 1875 atlas entry (IR912.772 S143at; AGLL Reel 13; full image online via Ball State) and the 1986 Selby reprint entry.
3. St. Joseph County Map Records inventory (51 sources, derived from Library of Congress and FamilySearch holdings): the atlas's extent of 116 pages.