Indiana City's paper geography: the park that was a power reserve, and the squares never built

1836 – PRESENT

The boldest lines on any Mishawaka plat were never built on: the Indiana City plat of 1836 reserved its riverfront for industry and its interior for institutions, and the city's present map still carries the reservations — under other uses. Between Joseph Street and the river the proprietors left a vacant tract marked on the plat "Reserved for water power," and drew a mill race from the rapids along the north side down to the "Island." Howard's account is flat: "The mill race, however, was never dug along the plat of Indiana City, and consequently the vacant tract was never used" for power. Years afterward Joseph Battell presented the tract — "this sightly tract, high over the St. Joseph river" — to the city of Mishawaka to be used as a public park, and it is kept to this day, with walks and drives, green-sward, flowers and shade trees, as Battell Park. The bluff park at the north end of Main Street is therefore the surviving piece of an 1836 power speculation: the one part of Indiana City's industrial paper that the ground itself preserved, by failing.

Two large squares were set apart in the plat under names that promised institutions: "College Green" and "Court House Square." No college was ever built on the College Green and no courthouse on the Court House Square — Mishawaka never became the county seat, and its colleges, when they came, came elsewhere (Bethel University on the city's east side in the twentieth century, in the schools file of this record). The squares' names are the record of the proprietors' bid: Indiana City was platted to be a capital, and the union of 1838, which made it a neighborhood of its south-bank rival instead, is the reason its grandest reservations read today as open ground and old names. The cemeteries tell the same story from the other side: Howard records that all of Mishawaka's cemeteries lie within the former plat of Indiana City — the north-bank town that failed as a town succeeded as the city's burying ground and its park bluff.

Sources

1. Timothy Edward Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), Chapter X, Sec. 4 — the "Reserved for water power" tract, the undug mill race, Battell's gift and Battell Park; the College Green and Court House Square reservations; the cemeteries within the plat.