Mishawaka Population and Demographics: The Count of the City

Population & Demographics · The count of Mishawaka

Every other section of this history describes a place; this one counts it. Mishawaka enters the federal census in 1850 with 1,412 people — a river town almost exactly the size of its neighbor, South Bend, at 1,652 — and it has been counted eighteen times since, and in that whole run the number has gone down exactly once. Read straight, the series tells a different story from the valley's other city: not a peak and a long decline, but a staircase — two great boundary-and-boom jumps in 1910 and 1930, a single Depression step backward in 1940, and then eighty years of unbroken, unspectacular growth to 51,063 in 2020, the most people the city has ever held. The numbers in this section come from the census record itself: the city series was read first-hand in the census volumes for the Story of Mishawaka section of this history, and it is printed here at full size with its conflicts named; the township series comes from the state's compilation of the same censuses; the composition series is printed at the strength each census's tables reach, and where a table was not reached, the gap is named rather than filled.

One warning belongs at the head of the table, because in Mishawaka it cuts deeper than in most cities: the city series is not a like-for-like series. Mishawaka repeatedly redrew its own borders — most greatly in January 1905, again at Twin Branch in 1927, again for Normain Heights in 1947, and in smaller takings throughout — so part of what reads as growth in 1910, 1930, 1950 and 1970 is boundary, not births or arrivals, and the annexation entry below separates the two wherever the record gives a number for the ground taken in. The township series is the control: Penn Township's borders are the stable frame around the moving city line, and the city's changing share of its own township — 59 percent in 1890, 88 percent in 1930, 74 percent in 2020 — measures both the annexations and the suburban township that grew up outside them. Estimates are printed as estimates, with their vintages; no estimate is ever blended into the census series.