The eras of growth, read off the numbers

1850 — 2020

A furnace town, a factory city, and then a staircase: The first era is the water-power town, and its rates are modest because the town was modest: 1,412 people in 1850, 2,640 in 1880 — the count nearly doubling in the 1860s as the railroad arrived, then stalling in the 1870s, the decade of the great fire of September 1872 that took some ninety percent of the business district. The town the nineteenth century made was a place of two to five thousand people for sixty years.

The second era, from 1890 to 1930, is the factory climb, and it is one of the steepest in Indiana's record. The city grew 64.9 percent in the 1890s, 113.8 percent in the 1900s — the annexation census, taken up at number size in the next entry — 27.8 percent in the 1910s, and 88.4 percent in the 1920s, the decade the city history calls Mishawaka the fastest-growing city in Indiana. In forty years the count went from 3,371 to 28,630, an eight-and-a-half-fold multiplication, on the woolen and rubber works, the Dodge works, and the immigrant streams whose counts the composition entries print. No later era resembles it; the city's whole subsequent history adds less, in proportion, than the 1920s added alone.

The third era is the interruption and the plateau. The 1940 census recorded the series' only decline, 332 people, 1.2 percent — the Depression's single mark on Mishawaka's curve, shallow because the factories' worst years here were shorter than the valley's other city's, and because no single employer's collapse governed the town. The 1950 count jumped 16.3 percent on the postwar boom and the Normain Heights ground; the 1960 count then barely moved, +1.4 percent — not because the region stopped growing, but because the growth of the 1950s went to the township outside the line: Penn Township added 4,392 people in the decade while the city added 448, and the township balance entry below tells that story in full.

The fourth era is the long staircase, 1960 to the present: +6.5, +13.2, +6.0, +9.3, +3.6, +5.8 percent — six consecutive growing censuses across sixty years in which the valley's larger city shrank in five of seven. The arithmetic of the staircase is the city's defining demographic fact: Mishawaka never boomed again after 1930 and never busted either; it annexed ground and filled it, decade after decade, at rates between three and thirteen percent, until the small factory city of 28,630 had become a city of 51,063 without a single decade of drama in either direction. The count's verdict on the present is narrow and should be stated narrowly: the 2020 census is the city's record, the Bureau's estimates hold it a step above the record, and the growth that remains is the staircase's growth — real, and slow.

Sources:

1. The decennial census table in the preceding entry; all rates and balances are computed from it.
2. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History (city-commissioned) — Mishawaka as the fastest-growing city in Indiana in the 1920s, printed as the city history's account. The fire of 1872 and the works' courses are carried in the Story of Mishawaka section and business records of this history, cross-referenced and not retold here.