The West End as annexed ground: the Great Annexation of 1905

JANUARY 1905 (THE MOVE DATED 1904 IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD HISTORY)

The enclave's ground entered the city in the largest single taking of Mishawaka's map: in January 1905 the city incorporated 1,353 acres of new territory — land west of Logan Street and south of the railroad tracks — in what the historian Susanna Ernst names the "Great Annexation." The take carried the West End and Belgian Town into the city, and with them ground that would later become Merrifield Park, Mishawaka High School and Fairview Cemetery. For the first time Mishawaka's western border touched South Bend's eastern boundary. The annexation was fought: farmers and other property owners objected and carried their case to the Indiana Supreme Court, and the annexation's boundaries were confirmed by 1908. The annexation act as government stands in the government file of this record; what stands here is its geography — the January 1905 line at Logan Street is the line that made the West End, and the far-west peninsula beyond it, city ground.

The neighborhood history of Hooligan Heights dates the same event a year earlier and a degree wider: "the city moved to annex land in 1904, adding almost 1,400 acres to its borders on all sides, with the exception of the northwest," with boundaries "solidified by 1908." Both statements stand as printed: Ernst and the city's commissioned history date the annexation's incorporation to January 1905; the neighborhood's own historians date the city's move to 1904 and round the acreage up. The discrepancy is the ordinary one between a decision and its legal completion, but the record reached does not say so, and this section does not average them.

The West End's later course inside the city is written in its addresses: the parish and bakery of the Belgian Town entry, the 1968 evening when Robert F. Kennedy's motorcade, after the downtown rally, "rode down Eighth Street through the West End, where hundreds more were able to see, touch, or shake hands with the candidate" — the enclave's main street used, in the commissioned history's telling, as the city's ceremonial west-side route five days before the Indiana primary. The West End is not Hooligan Heights: the peninsula beyond Logan was annexed in the same take, but the Belgians of the West End did not count it as theirs, and the next entry reads it as the separate place its own historians insist it is.

Sources

1. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History (city-commissioned) — the Great Annexation: 1,353 acres, January 1905, west of Logan Street and south of the tracks; Merrifield Park, Mishawaka High School and Fairview Cemetery ground; the Supreme Court fight and the 1908 confirmation; the Kennedy motorcade down Eighth Street, May 1968.
2. Hooligan Heights neighborhood history (hooliganheights.com), Beginnings — the 1904 dating, the near-1,400 acres "on all sides, with the exception of the northwest," boundaries solidified by 1908; the West End's exclusion of the Heights.
3. Government file of this record — the annexation as act.