Reverewood and the postwar plats: the suburbs inside the city

1960 – PRESENT

The largest planned housing community in the city's history is on its southeast edge: on the southeast edge of town, Portage Realty completed the first homes in the Reverewood subdivision in 1960 — a 507-acre development at the southeast corner of Harrison and Elm Roads. Reverewood's scale is the commissioned history's own superlative: the largest planned housing community in Mishawaka's history. And its course is still running: more than sixty years later, houses are still being built in Reverewood. A subdivision platted the year of the LaSalle renewal and still selling lots in the 2020s spans, by itself, the whole postwar era of the city's growth — from the renewal decade's clearances to the present map. Its builder's name, Portage Realty, is the documented builder at full size; the record reached carries no Reverewood plat phases or section dates beyond the 1960 start, and those stand as a named gap the county plat books would settle.

The same years redrew the city's commercial center of gravity northward, and the neighborhoods followed the stores: groundbreaking for the Town & Country Shopping Center, at the northeast corner of McKinley Avenue and Hickory Road, came in May 1960, and it opened in the spring of 1961 — accelerating the north side's growth, in the commissioned history's account, while hastening downtown's decline; the shopping centers' course is the malls file's. At the city's south, the later plats are documented more thinly: Blair Hills stands in the record as a named neighborhood, with the Autumn Trails and Rosewood subdivisions bringing new home construction adjacent to it after the second Meijer superstore opened on the south side in 1995. Blair Hills' own platting — its proprietor, its date, its builder — is not in the record reached, and it is named here as a gap, with the plat books and the Tribune's development record as its settling sources, rather than sketched from the real-estate listings that use its name.

Sources

1. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History (city-commissioned) — Reverewood: Portage Realty, first homes 1960, 507 acres at Harrison and Elm Roads, the city's largest planned housing community, still building after sixty years; Town & Country, May 1960–spring 1961; Autumn Trails and Rosewood adjacent to Blair Hills, after the 1995 Meijer.
2. Malls file of this record — the shopping centers' course.