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1841–1845 in Mishawaka · then South Bend, La Porte and Michigan City
The first newspaper published in Mishawaka was the Mishawaka Tocsin, established in 1841 by Wilbur F. Storey. So Timothy Edward Howard's 1907 county history states it, with a historian's hedge the record keeps: the Tocsin "seems to have been" the first. Chapman's 1880 county history, written within living memory of the event, gives the same founding without the hedge — the Tocsin established in 1841 by Wilbur F. Storey, "the present editor of the Chicago Times," as Chapman identifies him for his 1880 readers. Storey, who went on to the Detroit Free Press and to fame and notoriety at the Chicago Times, began at the La Porte Herald and in this valley; the Tocsin was a young man's frontier weekly in an iron town six years from its founding.
Storey did not keep it long. George Merrifield — merchant, town founder-generation figure, and publisher — succeeded him, and in 1845 Thomas Jernegan bought the paper, removed the office to South Bend, and changed the name to the Indiana Tocsin. At South Bend the support proved insufficient; the paper suspended, and the office was removed to La Porte. Howard's biographical volume carries the itinerary one stop further, in the life of Thomas Jernegan's son: purchasing the Mishawaka Tocsin, Jernegan "moved it to South Bend, next to Laporte and ultimately to Michigan City." The first paper printed in Mishawaka thus ended as an emigrant four times over, and the town was left without a paper of its own. Merrifield's connection to print outlasted his publishing: in 1859 the Enterprise carried his nine-article series "Mishawaka: Its Early History and Present Condition" — the town's first publisher become its first historian, in the columns of the paper that finally stayed.
Sources
- Chas. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), the county press chapter, read first-hand.
- Timothy Edward Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), vol. 1, the Mishawaka chapter, "The Press"; vol. 2, the biography of Edward A. Jernegan, read first-hand.
- Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History, the city-commissioned history, on the Tocsin and Merrifield's 1859 series.