Battell Park

1836 — PRESENT

The city's first public park began as ground reserved, and withheld, on a speculative plat: When Joseph Battell and Grove and James R. Lawrence platted Indiana City on the north bank in 1836, they reserved the high riverfront tract — the ground Howard's history describes as "reserved for water power" — as a private pleasure ground called Riverside Park, and the town used it informally as a park for more than twenty years before it was the city's to keep. Joseph Battell bought out the Lawrences' interest in 1852 and held the whole; he died 8 July 1874, and his brother and sister, Robbins and Anna Battell, carried his intention forward. In 1879 Robbins Battell hired a landscape gardener from the East, "known only by the name of McClunnie," to survey and plat the park, and the donors stipulated that it be "improved and beautified and designed completely, preferably using the skills and talents of McClunnie" — McClunnie is the park's designer of record, and the fact matters to the Kessler entry that follows. Robbins transferred his interest to Anna in November 1880; Anna formally offered the park to the town at a council meeting on 22 December 1880, and the deed was officially transferred in February 1881 — the city's commissioned history compresses the gift to December 1880, and the National Register nomination's two-step sequence stands here as the fuller record. Renamed Battell Park, on ground the state marker dates to a park "circa 1860s" and its gift to 1881, it remains, in the marker's words, "Mishawaka's oldest park."

By the fall of 1881, under McClunnie's supervision, the park had a wooden fence, a serpentine sidewalk, and a "romantic, rustic" bridge over the ravine that cuts its ground — a natural washout that organizes the whole site — and the spring of 1882 brought a massive planting of trees, the work shared between the city and the family. On 18 September 1884 the park received its monument: a soldier figure eight feet tall on an ornamental shaft, thirty-two feet overall, cast by the White Bronze Company of Detroit for $1,460, erected by the Mishawaka Soldiers' Monument Association with a time capsule sealed in its cornerstone — local newspapers, the association's members, the city officers, coins, business cards. The dedication coincided with the fifth annual reunion of the Soldiers and Sailors of Northern Indiana, which brought more than ten thousand people to the park — the largest gathering ever to visit Mishawaka to that date — with the veterans' tent camp, Camp Robert Boyd, laid out at the west end of Lawrence Street. The monument's own course is a small history of care: by 1894 it leaned west and the White Bronze Company returned to realign it; a Civil War cannon that stood west of it was, at some point after 1957, reportedly thrown over the embankment into the river; by 1967 the memorial leaned severely south on a cracked and settling base, and the Mishawaka DeMolay organization restored and straightened it on a new concrete base, losing the original carved stone base and its battle medallions; and after Memorial Day 2019 the monument was taken to Ohio for restoration, returning before Memorial Day 2020 to a new base and a Veterans Plaza built west of its old ground, rededicated that Memorial Day.

The park's built fabric came in two later waves. In 1918 a small brick restroom and storage building rose by the ravine, with a small wooden bandshell; the citizens wanted a larger one by late 1926, and between 20 May and 15 August 1927 the Hay Weaver company built the present bandshell — Classical Revival, brick, limestone and concrete under a copper dome, some $20,000, its designer unknown — dedicated on 28 May 1928 to the city's World War I veterans, the ceremony ending a parade at the park. In 1936–37 the Works Progress Administration terraced the ravine into a five-tier rock garden: a miniature mill house with a working water wheel at the top, then chutes, valleys, fountains and lily pools, the water dropping at last over a rock-covered embankment into the river; the WPA afterward built the circular concrete wading pool that still stood in the park when its record was written for the National Register — one of the few such pools not removed after the polio scares of the early 1950s. The park's measured size is eleven acres, on the nomination's verbal boundary from Mishawaka Avenue's south line to the river's high-water mark; a larger figure of roughly twenty acres circulates in visitor roundups, unattributed and unattested in any document, and the eleven documented acres stand against it. The city designated the park a local single-site historic district in 1994; the Battell Park Historic District was listed in the National Register of Historic Places on 11 January 1996, on a nomination dated 22 August 1995 — the district listing is sometimes dated 1995 in secondary sources, from the nomination year, and both dates stand printed here. The park at 301 West Mishawaka Avenue is today the western anchor of the Riverwalk, and its trail carries the walk's official name, the River St. Joseph of the Miamis Trail.

Sources:

1. National Register of Historic Places nomination, Battell Park Historic District (prepared by Adrian Scott Fine, 22 August 1995; NRIS 95001541; listed 11 January 1996) — the reservation, the gift sequence, McClunnie, the 1881 improvements, the 1884 memorial and its restorations, the bandshell, the rock garden and wading pool, the eleven acres.
2. Indiana Historical Bureau, marker 71.1997.2, "Battell Park" — the city's oldest park, circa 1860s, given to the city in 1881; the monument (1884), bandshell (1927) and rock garden (1937).
3. Timothy E. Howard, History of St. Joseph County (1907) — the reserved tract presented by Mr. Battell for a public park.
4. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — the gift compressed to December 1880; the 2019–2020 monument restoration and Veterans Plaza.