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1846–1848 · 1848
The Mishawaka Bee was started in 1846 by S. P. Hart and discontinued after two years. Chapman and Howard agree on the founder, the year and the lifespan, and neither records more: no editor after Hart, no politics assigned, no file surviving. The Bee is the town's second paper and its first folding — a two-year weekly in a village that the 1850 census would count at 1,412 people.
The Free Democrat was a campaign paper and lived exactly as long as its campaign. Chapman: "The Free Democrat was started in 1848 by E. W. H. Ellis, to support the Free-Soil movement and the election of Martin Van Buren to the presidency, but it survived but a few months." Howard names him Dr. E. W. H. Ellis and fixes the contest: the paper supported Van Buren against Lewis Cass, and "did not survive the campaign." Van Buren, running on the Free Soil ticket in 1848, lost; his Mishawaka organ closed with the canvass. The two failures frame the town's first press decade: a general weekly that could not hold, and a party paper that was never meant to. What Mishawaka lacked, until the 1850s, was not readers but a reason for a paper to outlive its occasion.
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), the Mishawaka chapter, "The Press," read first-hand.