The fire chiefs as people: Pressler's decade and the twenty-one

1904 – today

The line at the strength the sister file gives it: The Fire & Safety section owns the fire chiefs' institutional succession, and it stands documented there at these points: Amos Williard, chief of the volunteers and first chief of the paid department of 1904, resigned 1905, reinstated 1 April 1907; Charles R. Shelton, chief in the 1921 directory; Marshall Potts, chief from 1926 to 1930, the National Register nomination's dating. This section's business is the men the directories add to that line and the arithmetic the city's own count creates.

Thomas H. Pressler: The 1949 directory names the chief of the fire department: Thomas H. Pressler, headquarters at Central Station, 212 North Church, with Arth. Heyde as fire inspector. (The same book's government page gives his middle initial as A; the classified pages and the alphabetical entry — "Pressler Thos H (Mary A), chief fire department, h701 Studebaker" in 1956 — give H, two listings to one, and H is printed with the variant noted here rather than silently chosen.) The 1956 directory names him chief still, seven years on, and seats him on the Board of Public Safety beside the mayor and the police chief — the two uniformed chiefs and the mayor constituting the board that governed both departments, a frame in which Pressler's decade was spent governing as well as commanding.

DeCaussemaker, and the count of twenty-one: The 1963 directory's fire headquarters entry names the chief by surname: DeCaussemaker, 212 North Church. The same book's alphabetical pages give two men of the name — Alphonse DeCaussemaker, a controller at a clothing store, and Andrew E. DeCaussemaker — and tag neither as chief; the chief's given name is therefore not in the record reached, and the surname stands alone in the succession with the gap named (the settling records are the Board of Public Safety minutes and the department's own rolls). In February 2026 the city appointed Joshua Jester the department's twenty-first fire chief — the count the city's own, as the Fire & Safety section prints it. Set the count against the documented line: Williard, Shelton, Potts, Pressler, DeCaussemaker, and the modern three the sister file carries — Dale Freeman, to 2016; Bryon Woodward, 2016 to 13 February 2026; Jester — are eight holders. The city's arithmetic says twenty-one. Thirteen chiefs of the Mishawaka Fire Department are therefore counted by the city and unnamed in the record this build reached: the gap is not an absence in the department's history but a measure of how much of it lives in the department's own records and the safety board's minutes, and it is printed here at that size, as this section's standing invitation to the archive that holds it.

Sources:

1. R. L. Polk & Co., directories of 1949 and 1956 — Fire Chief Thomas H. Pressler (the 1949 government page's middle initial A noted); 1956 alphabetical entry, "Pressler Thos H (Mary A) chf fire dept h701 Studebaker"; Board of Public Safety membership, 1956.
2. R. L. Polk & Co., Polk's South Bend City Directory (1963), Mishawaka section — Fire Department Headquarters, DeCaussemaker chief, 212 N. Church; alphabetical entries for Alphonse and Andrew E. DeCaussemaker.
3. The Fire & Safety section of this history — Williard, Shelton and Potts at documented strength; Freeman, Woodward and Jester from the Congressional Record honor of 8 June 2016 and the city's announcements of December 2025 and February 2026, Jester appointed the twenty-first chief on the city's count.