The River Park boundary: the town Mishawaka tried to annex and lost

1892 – 1910

This ground is South Bend's build; Mishawaka's fact in it is a failed annexation, and it is boundary-printed at that size: River Park, between South Bend and Mishawaka on the north side of the river, was platted by Albert J. Horne and Benjamin F. Dunn, its original plat acknowledged 7 April 1892, with Fordham and Berner's Grove among its later additions. Its people chose their own course: a petition for incorporation was filed 7 May 1900, the election of 23 May 1900 favored incorporation, a remonstrance was heard, the county commissioners at first refused — and the circuit court reversed them, ordering the town of River Park incorporated on 28 December 1900. Howard in 1907 counted it at two to three hundred people, with a post office, a school, businesses and the South Bend Watch factory. In August 1910 the Mishawaka City Council annexed River Park, northwest of the river and Logan Street; Indiana law permitted the annexation but gave River Park's citizens the right to remonstrate, they exercised it, the annexation was reversed — and River Park later became part of South Bend. Potawatomi Park adjoins the ground: sixty acres, including the forty of the old county fair grounds, placed in South Bend's custody by the act approved 1 March 1905 and transferred 3 April 1906. The episode is the west-side mirror of the Great Annexation: in 1905 Mishawaka's line moved west to meet South Bend's; in 1910 South Bend's future suburb successfully refused to move into Mishawaka, and the boundary between the two cities on the northwest has run where River Park's remonstrance left it ever since.

Sources

1. Timothy Edward Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), Chapter X, Sec. 4 — the Horne and Dunn plat of 7 April 1892; the incorporation course of 1900; the town in 1907; Potawatomi Park's 1905 act and 1906 transfer.
2. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History (city-commissioned) — the annexation of August 1910, the remonstrance and reversal, River Park's later course into South Bend.