The working city sheets: drawn as half of a two-city product, 1876–2000

The joint plans, street maps, and city atlases of South Bend and Mishawaka, from the 1876 plan to the Rand McNally StreetFinder

The single most Mishawaka-specific fact in the commercial record is how rarely Mishawaka is on a sheet alone. The county library's map case preserves the run, and its earliest joint sheet is also its most evocative: an 1876 Plan of South Bend and Mishawaka, digitized in the library's Michiana Memory collection — the two river towns drawn together a year after the atlas drew them apart, at the moment when their street grids, rail lines, and mill races already formed one working landscape. From there the case and the State Library's list together carry the succession: a 1921 map of the two cities; Greater South Bend and Mishawaka sheets of 1937 and 1939; Bruggner's two-city street mapping of about 1949 and his 1958 street map of the county and cities; the Map Corporation of America's Map of Mishawaka, Osceola, South Bend and Vicinity of the 1950s; the Drake/Car-Tel Know South Bend and Mishawaka of about 1954; the Area Plan Commission's 1967 census-tract map of the two cities at about 1:24,000; Arrow's Official Arrow Map of South Bend, Mishawaka & Osceola of about 1980; Spectrum's joint city map of 1989; and the line's commercial end, Rand McNally's South Bend/Elkhart, Michiana StreetFinder of about 2000 — in which Mishawaka is no longer even the second name, the two-city sheet having become a regional one.

Three sheets in the run break the pattern, and they are the ones a Mishawaka reader should seek first. Calvin Moon's Up-to-Date Indexed Maps of South Bend and Mishawaka of about 1913 — a large-format map in the State Library's list — is joint in title but indexed in form: an index turns a picture into a directory, and Moon's sheet was made to be worked from, its streets findable by name. Frederick J. Anderson's Atlas of the Cities of South Bend and Mishawaka, Indiana, published in South Bend by G. L. Hughes in 1923, is the two-city product at atlas scale — the only plate-book the two cities ever shared, and the commercial atlas line's last word on Mishawaka; the county map-records inventory lists both the 1923 atlas and a 1923 map of the cities. And in 1908 the Hibberd printing family issued the exception that proves the rule: a Map of Mishawaka & River Park — a Mishawaka-only companion to Hibberd's 1908 South Bend map, its title naming the streetcar suburb of River Park as part of the city's public face. River Park's presence in a map title in 1908 is itself evidence: the suburb was new, it was selling, and a map was how a 1908 suburb announced that it existed.

What this run proves, taken whole, is the market's verdict on the two cities' geography. Map publishers sell to populations, and for a hundred and twenty-five years the saleable unit on this ground was the pair — one labour market, one rail web, one river — with Mishawaka's name second on nearly every title page. The maps are honest about the fact even when the cities' pride was not. Their evidentiary use is the street record: street names, additions, and the built edge of each city at each date, read sheet against sheet, with the county library's case — inventoried in its Michiana Memory finding aid as of 20 December 2021 — as the run's surviving home.

Sources:

1. St. Joseph County Public Library, Local & Family History map-case finding aid (Michiana Memory, aid as of 20 December 2021): the 1876 plan (digitized), the 1921 map, the 1937 and 1939 Greater sheets, Bruggner's 1958 street map, and the case's joint-map run.
2. Indiana State Library, St. Joseph County maps list: Moon's indexed maps c. 1913; Anderson's 1923 cities atlas (G. L. Hughes, South Bend); Bruggner's [1949]; the Map Corporation of America sheet [195-?]; Drake/Car-Tel c. 1954; the Area Plan Commission census-tract map of 1967; Arrow c. 1980; Spectrum 1989; Rand McNally c. 2000.
3. St. Joseph County Map Records inventory: the 1923 cities atlas and 1923 cities map under Mishawaka.
4. This build, neighborhoods pass: Hibberd's 1908 Map of Mishawaka & River Park and the River Park suburb record.