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1955–1976 · the town as someone else's press
In 1962 Mishawaka held a second periodical address, and it belonged to Indiana agriculture. Ayer's directory for that year lists the Countryman's Press: bi-weekly, classed "Ind. Agric." — an Indiana agricultural paper — established 1955, five columns, subscription one dollar, circulation 4,389, edited by Robert A. Rhodes and published by the Cooperative Publishing Company at 116 West Mishawaka Avenue. The library's film holds the paper from January 1957 to December 1976, a nineteen-year file. The Countryman's Press was not a Mishawaka paper in allegiance — its constituency was the state's farm country, and its Mishawaka Avenue address was a plant and an office, not a hometown — but it belongs in this record for what it says about the town: by the 1950s Mishawaka was a place where a statewide paper could be published, its presses and its postal address serving a readership that mostly never saw the city. It is the Dodge Idea's pattern repeated at newspaper scale: Mishawaka as a print shop for other people's publics.
Sources
- N. W. Ayer & Son's Directory of Newspapers and Periodicals (1962), the Mishawaka entry, read first-hand from the printed page image.
- Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library, newspaper holdings list, the Countryman's Press run, January 1957–December 1976, read first-hand.