Where the work survives: the reader's route

The keeping places, as the record gives them

Scattered, and partly out of state: No archive of a Mishawaka studio's negatives was found in the records reached — not for Gibson, not for Kaylor, not for any of the twenty-three of 1956 — and that absence is printed first because it governs all the rest: what survives of Mishawaka photography survives as prints, dispersed. The named survivals, in the order a reader would work them. The city's own keeping: the Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library's Heritage Room lists historical photographs among its physical holdings — with the yearbooks, the local clippings file, maps and microfilm — displays the May 1917 recruits photograph described above, and maintains the Mishawaka Memories digital archive, photographs, letters and other media of Mishawaka history, open at any hour; the library's digital reach also carries the Ball Band newsletters through Michiana Memory. The school keeping: the Hannah Lindahl Children's Museum, behind Emmons School, held the Mishawaka Public School records of 1887–1914 and a relatively complete record — photographs and addresses through 1960 — of Mishawaka High School's class of 1920. The museum has closed; the date of its closing and the present home of those collections are not stated in the records reached, and both stand as named gaps, with the School City of Mishawaka and the library's Heritage Room as the settling addresses. The far survivals: a Mishawaka carnival portrait by Charles L. Ostrander in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (object 2024.610.216); Ostrander's 1915 button-factory print in the Kenneth Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas (RH PH 539(f)); Clement Kaylor's embossed real-photo postcards of 1911–12 in two family collections in East Flanders, Belgium; and the ca. 1915 elevated Ball Band view in the Joan Hostetler Collection, Indianapolis. The pattern is the fragment's last finding: the work of Mishawaka's named photographers survives best where it traveled — to a national museum, a university library, an emigrant's family's album — while the work that stayed home survives largely without its makers' names.

Sources:

1. Cross-reference: Libraries — the MPHPL Heritage Room's holdings by kind (historical photographs among them), the displayed May 1917 recruits photograph, the Mishawaka Memories digital archive, and the Ball Band newsletters through Michiana Memory.
2. Cross-reference: Museums — the Hannah Lindahl Children's Museum's holdings (Mishawaka Public School records 1887–1914; the class of 1920's photographs-and-addresses record through 1960); the museum's closing and the collections' disposition unstated in the record reached.
3. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, record 917952; University of Kansas, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, RH PH 539(f); Kristine Smets, "Postcards from Mishawaka," The Belgian American, 27 June 2023 (the Kaylor postcards' keeping; the Hostetler Collection's ca. 1915 Ball Band view, n. 52).