The Children's Campus: the city's own institution

1882 — the orphans-home ground, in care of children still

Mishawaka's one indigenous institution of the mind began as an orphanage: The ground's founding stands in this history's Charities record and is carried here in a line: the St. Joseph County Orphans Home, opened in July 1882 on Vistula Street by the Woman's Christian Temperance Union's founding charity, and rebuilt in 1907 — a building of about $100,000 — at the southwest corner of Logan and West Second Streets for the Northern Indiana Aid Society. The home ran on as the Mishawaka Children's Home, its photo albums preserving named children's portraits dated 1930, 1931, 1932, and 1937. Between the albums and the modern campus the corporate paper is thin, and the Charities record names the gap; what the mental-health record owns begins where the institution's purpose turns clinical. By the 1990s the ground was the main campus and offices of Family & Children's Center, Inc. — the 1882 founding's corporate descendant — a state-licensed private child care facility caring, in the Seventh Circuit's words, for approximately 110 emotionally handicapped children at any one time, with a capacity of approximately 130: children held in the center's physical custody by court order or by the action of state and local welfare departments, educated from 1979 in the center's own school, and lodged between the main campus and three group homes, one in Mishawaka and two in South Bend. The federal provider record of the following decade classifies the house by its clinical character: The Children's Campus, Inc., at 216 South Logan Street, with its mailing address on the campus's Lincolnway frontage at 1411 Lincolnway West, is carried in the national provider registry as a community based residential treatment facility for mental illness. The campus at its documented fullest: the Tribune's account of 2002, as the center replaced two residential buildings of the 1950s, counts about 148 children, ages six to eighteen, living at the center — "what began as an orphanage in 1882 is now the Children's Campus of Family and Children's Center, a place where severely emotionally disturbed children get help putting their lives together" — and its account of August 2005 counts 130 children in its programs under executive director Patricia McLemore, dedicating a chapel of 1,025 square feet for voluntary spiritual programming. The city's own history carries the ground's continuity in one sentence, quoted in the Charities record: "Though no longer an orphanage today, Oaklawn Center's Children's Campus continues to meet the emotional, educational, and developmental needs of children." How the campus passed to Oaklawn is told in the Oaklawn entry below; the ground's own line is the point here. From 1882 to the present campus, through orphanage, children's home, and residential treatment center, one Mishawaka ground has been given continuously to the care of other people's children — and its modern form, a licensed residential treatment facility for emotionally disturbed children, is the oldest continuously serving mental-health institution on Mishawaka soil.

Sources:

1. Charities section of this history — the Orphans Home of July 1882 on Vistula Street; the 1907 Northern Indiana Aid Society building at Logan and West Second at about $100,000 (the 1907 county history's biographical volume, the contractor H. G. Christman's account); the Mishawaka Children's Home photo albums of 1930–1937 (South Bend Area Genealogical Society); and De Kever's sentence on the Oaklawn Children's Campus, quoted there — the founding and the ground carried here at pointer size as briefed.
2. Family & Children's Center, Inc. v. School City of Mishawaka, 13 F.3d 1052 (7th Cir. 1994) — the center as the court describes it: an Indiana nonprofit corporation operating a licensed, private child care facility; main campus and offices in Mishawaka; three group homes, one in Mishawaka and two in South Bend; approximately 110 emotionally handicapped children at any one time, held by court order or welfare-department action; its own school begun in 1979. The district court's record, quoted in the appeal, gives the census as approximately 115 children in custody with a capacity of approximately 130.
3. National Provider Identifier registry record, The Children's Campus, Inc. (NPI 1295905263) — 216 South Logan Street, Mishawaka, mailing address 1411 Lincolnway West; taxonomy "Community Based Residential Treatment Facility (Mental Illness)"; the registry record as last updated in 2008.
4. South Bend Tribune, 2002 and 17 August 2005, as carried in the Mishawaka Public Library's newspaper record (ProQuest) — the 2002 building project: about 148 children ages six to eighteen, the two 1950s residential buildings replaced, the orphanage sentence quoted; and the 2005 chapel dedication: 130 children in the campus's programs, executive director Patricia McLemore, the 1,025-square-foot chapel.