The Children's Museum at Work: Murals, a Village, and a Tea Room

1402 South Main Street, 1946 to the 2010s

What generations of Mishawaka schoolchildren walked through was a compressed history of their own ground, built to be touched. In Gallery Hall a large mural by Judith Goodrick Heying traced the local history from the Ice Age through the early 1800s, when the northern Indiana of the Potawatomi held the valley; near it stood a replica of a Native American wigwam that children were free to explore. Through the Conestoga Wagon Hallway the visitor entered the Pioneer Village, a recreated mid-1800s Mishawaka: a one-room schoolhouse, a general store, a furnished two-room house, a post office, and an all-eras toy store. The museum's Japanese Tea Room taught the tradition of Mishawaka's sister city, Shiojiri, Japan; the Guske Dollhouse replicated a 1904 Victorian home in miniature; the Kaleidoscope Hall held rotating exhibits and a viewing room for exhibit films; a Survive Alive House taught fire safety; and there were nature exhibits and a gift shop selling gemstones, fossils, Japanese fans, puzzles, and candy.

The working rhythm was a school's rhythm. In the genealogical society's account of its mature years, the hours ran Tuesday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., through the school year, plus the first and second Saturdays of each month — closed at noon hours, and closed whenever school was not in session in the School City of Mishawaka. Admission in that account was one dollar for visitors six and up, fifty cents for ages two to five. Director Peggy Marker conducted as many as 300 tours in a year's time, with one volunteer helper, Lucy Minnix; a later profile puts the school-age tours at about 130 a year and adds classroom education kits that School City teachers could borrow. The museum's documented public life runs at least to April 30, 2016, when it held a free Indiana Bicentennial event — attend class in the one-room schoolhouse, buy a candy stick from the general store clerk, mail a postcard from the vintage post office — under director Lexie Schroeder Kobb, whose name the state's Bicentennial listing carries as the museum's contact.

Principal sources

1. The Clio, entry 22458 — the exhibit inventory (Gallery Hall and the Heying mural, the wigwam, the Conestoga Wagon Hallway, Pioneer Village, the Tea Room, the Guske Dollhouse, Kaleidoscope Hall, the Survive Alive House).
2. South Bend Area Genealogical Society, "Hannah Lindahl Museum" — the hours, the admission, Peggy Marker's tours, Lucy Minnix.
3. Indiana Bicentennial Commission, legacy project IBC-HC-236 (in.gov) — the event of 30 April 2016; Lexie Schroeder Kobb, director.