The files: what survives, where it sits, and what is only a name

The archive state · named plainly

Mishawaka's newspaper file sits, in the main, in one room: the Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library's local history collection, which holds newspapers published in St. Joseph County from 1853 to the current year on microfilm, maintains the Mishawaka Memories digital archive, and gives its cardholders the South Bend Tribune Archives and Newspapers.com's library edition. Its published holdings list, read first-hand for this section, gives the survival title by title. The Enterprise: the issue of April 7, 1858, to October 28, 1865, a single issue of May 28, 1870, and then from September 7, 1872 — the week of the Great Fire — in a weekly sequence that runs, through duplicate and overlapping reels the list itself discloses, to December 26, 2019; the gaps are the later 1860s and scattered years, not the Story of Mishawaka section. Inside that run sit the Mishawaka Daily of June 1926 and the Fair Dealer of 1937. The Democrat: 1897–98 and July 1907–August 1908. The Times: 1961 to October 1966. The Countryman's Press: January 1957 to December 1976. The Monitor: April 1993 to February 1995. The Daily Journal: two issues. The Daily Bazar: two Christmas seasons.

Against that plenty, the absences are exact. No issue of the Tocsin, the Bee, the Free Democrat or the Free Press stands in the library's list — Mishawaka's first four papers survive only in other papers' notices, in the county histories, and in a dissertation's quotations. Digitization has not yet reached the town's own titles: the Hoosier State Chronicles access list, the state's digitized newspaper program, carries no Mishawaka heading at all — the list runs from Milford to Monon — and Mishawaka's digitized window is the South Bend News-Times of 1913–1922, filed under the other city. A commercial archive holds a partial Enterprise run — 127 issues by its own count, scattered 1898–1920 — and a single stray number, the Enterprise of Friday evening, September 19, 1884, is cataloged as far away as the University of Kansas's Spencer Library, in a collector's papers. The state library's searchable microfilm index, built on Miller's bibliography, is the settling apparatus for the holdings questions this history could not close — beginning with the post-1962 Enterprise mastheads, which the film itself holds and no one has yet read off the reels.

Sources

1. Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library, St. Joseph County, Indiana Newspapers holdings list (2025), read first-hand in full; the library's published descriptions of its Local & Family History collection, the Heritage Room, and Mishawaka Memories.
2. Hoosier State Chronicles, the digitized-newspapers access list, read in full — no Mishawaka title; the South Bend News-Times (1913–1922) under South Bend.
3. NewspaperArchive, the Mishawaka Enterprise archive page, for the aggregator's 127-issue partial run; Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas, the catalog record for the Enterprise of September 19, 1884.
4. Indiana State Library, the newspaper holdings and digitization program pages.