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THE SMALL PARKS' OWN WORDS
Two of the smallest parks carry the system's memory work, and the city tells both stories itself: Honor Park is, in the city's parks page's own words, "a small traffic island. Conceived in the late 1940s, Honor Park initially included an engraved stone to honor a soldier who had died during World War II. In 1997, four shells were obtained from the South Bend Regional Airport's Military Honor Park and placed at the site to replace the engraved stone, which had been broken. In 2000, the park was reconstructed using the same shell materials from 1997" — the shells mounted in cement blocks and painted black with gold tips, the colors chosen, the city records elsewhere in the same account, to symbolize a live shell. Heroes Park is the system's newest renaming: the ground was Hums Park until the Mayor's Youth Advisory Council took the lead in redesigning it, and it reopened as Heroes Park in 2021 with a running trail, a Ninja training course and a basketball court with glass backboards and permanent seating — "each element of the park named to honor local heroes, such as coaches and athletes like Anna Rohrer and Devin Cannady," in De Kever's account: the high school distance champion and the basketball guard, the city's own, named onto its ground by its own young people. The neighborhood parks between these poles — Crawford Park at 445 Niles Avenue beside Shiojiri Niwa, Laing Park at the city's east door on the old Lincoln Highway, and the rest of the inventory — stand in this record at inventory size, their individual foundings not established in the sources.
Sources:
- City of Mishawaka, parks pages (November 2026) — Honor Park's conception, stone, shells and reconstruction, in the city's own text.
- Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — Hums Park's redesign by the Mayor's Youth Advisory Council and its reopening as Heroes Park in 2021; the hero namings.
- City of Mishawaka, 2022 Parks Activity Guide — Crawford Park's and the neighborhood parks' addresses and standing.