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120 South Church Street, 1998 to the present
The museum function Mishawaka used longest, after the children's museum, was a room inside its public library. When the Mishawaka-Penn Public Library expanded into the former post office and police station in 1998, the added space opened as the Heritage Center: genealogy records, digital archives, yearbooks, microfilm, and historical newspapers under one roof, behind the post office's original exterior doors. The city's commissioned historian, Peter J. De Kever, helped assemble it — "brought together all the library's resources — microfilm, books, files on Mishawaka history, genealogy" — and lent it artifacts from his own collection. The room closed in March 2020 with the pandemic and reopened in 2021 as the Heritage Room: the library's designated quiet zone, and still a display room, its five hand-crafted cases built around the Five Industries That Made Mishawaka — Ball Band, Dodge, Wheelabrator, Bendix, and Kamm & Schellinger — with further exhibits spotlighting the Jernegan and Powell families, many of the artifacts on loan from De Kever.
The room, with the library's Shiojiri Room, places the system among the more than 150 libraries in the Indiana Library Passport program, cited there for the rooms' historical significance. The Heritage Room is the public library's institution and stands whole in this history's Libraries file; it is carried here because for a quarter-century it was also one of the city's two working museums — the one that never closed for good.
Principal sources
- Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library, "Heritage Room" (mphpl.org), with the Pete De Kever documentary transcript — the 1998 opening, the 2020 closing, the 2021 reopening, the Five Industries cases, the De Kever loans, the Passport program.
- This build's Libraries pass — the room's full course in the library's own record.