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SUMMER 1833 – 17 FEBRUARY 1838
The south bank was platted first, around a furnace: Alanson M. Hurd bought the 640-acre School Section 16 on 1 January 1833 at $1.25 an acre, and in the summer of 1833, as his blast furnace rose, the village of St. Joseph Iron Works was platted to the south — founded, in the city's commissioned history's dating, on 15 July 1833. Hurd's village covered approximately forty square blocks south of the river, bisected by the Vistula Road, the region's great east–west route. It was a company town in the strict paper sense: the plat existed because the works existed, and its first population — about a hundred residents in 1834 — was, in the commissioned history's words, mostly workers and their families. The village incorporated on 31 January 1835, the first incorporated village in St. Joseph County, ahead of South Bend itself.
The second south-bank plat was a merchant's town: east of the Iron Works ground, William Barbee and Henry Harman platted their "Plat of the Town of Mishawaka" on 2 April 1835, acknowledged 20 April 1835 — the first plat to carry the name Mishawaka, which until then belonged to the post office. The settlement around it was known as Barbee Town. That a plat named Mishawaka existed inside what became Mishawaka is the kind of duplication the union act of 1838 was written to end, and Timothy Howard's 1907 county history still kept the division names alive as the town's working geography: the "original plat," "Taylor's Addition," "Barbee's Addition," "Lawrence & Battell's Addition" and the several "Fowler's Additions."
The north bank was speculation at city scale: Joseph Battell and the brothers James R. Lawrence and Grove Lawrence acknowledged the plat of Indiana City on 28 June 1836 — the south half of Section 9 and the northwest fraction of Section 16, Township 37 North, Range 3 East — a full rival town across the river, laid out with a manufacturer's geography and a government's ambitions, whose paper is read whole in the Indiana City entry below. East of it lay the fourth plat: George W. R. Fowler's village. H. H. Fowler's Addition was acknowledged 8 March 1837, and a second Fowler plat was surveyed on 19 April 1837 by Thomas P. Bulla, taking the southwest fractional quarter of Section 10. Howard's summary of the close of 1837 is the founding fact of the city's map: "no less than four independent town plats, besides the additions" — Iron Works and Mishawaka on the south side, Indiana City and Fowler's village on the north.
The plats' union was legislative, not organic. On 17 February 1838 the General Assembly approved the act "to bring the several towns and additions under one name" — Local Laws of 1837–38, Chapter CCXXXIII, page 410 — changing the names of St. Joseph Iron Works and Indiana City alike to Mishawaka and gathering "all the lots now laid out on either side of the Big St. Joseph river, at the head of the Mishawaka rapids, in the township of Penn" into one town. The detailed paper of the four plats — their lot counts, block schedules and full street layouts — survives in the county recorder's plat books; the record reached carries the plats' proprietors, dates and legal descriptions whole, and the lot-level detail is named here as a gap the recorder's books would settle.
Sources
- Timothy Edward Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), Chapter X, Secs. 4–6 — the Indiana City plat's acknowledgment, proprietors and legal description; the four-plat summary at the close of 1837; the union act quoted.
- Acts of Indiana, Local Laws 1837–38, Ch. CCXXXIII, p. 410 — the union act of 17 February 1838.
- Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History (city-commissioned) — Hurd's purchase, the village platted summer 1833 and founded 15 July, the forty square blocks and the Vistula Road, incorporation 31 January 1835, the 1834 population of workers and families.
- Spine file of this record — the plat anchor dates and the Hurd purchase at first hand.