The swimming course

THE RIVER ERA AND THE POOLS

Mishawaka swam in its river before it swam in its pools, and the record dates the pools better than the river era's end: The first municipal water structure in the record is not a pool but a wading pool: the circular concrete wading pool the WPA built at Battell Park after the rock garden, in the late 1930s, which survived in place when the park's National Register record was written in 1995 — most such pools elsewhere were dug out after the polio scares of the early 1950s. Of the river-swimming era itself — the generations who swam off the banks and below the dam — the sources reached carry no dated beginning and no documented end: no ordinance, no closure, no last-swim account stands in this record, and the era's documented end is named here as unestablished rather than guessed. Municipal swimming proper begins, on the record, in 1968, when the Merrifield complex opened its Olympic-size pool and diving tower under Mayor Prickett, carried in the Merrifield entry. The city afterward kept two pools: the Tribune's briefs of 2001–2002 speak of "the two Mishawaka city pools, Merrifield and Mary Gibbard" — the second at Mary Gibbard Park, 1024 Somerset Avenue — and record the Mary Gibbard pool's seasonal closing in August 2001 under pool director Kevin Carter. When the Mary Gibbard pool closed for good, and whether it stands, is not established in the sources reached. The present generation swims shallower: the parks department's 2022 activity guide counts six splash pads across the system, and Central Park's 2015 rebuilding put its spray pad where the Rubber Regenerating works once stood astride the race — the water-play of the twenty-first century on the water-power ground of the nineteenth.

Sources:

1. National Register nomination, Battell Park Historic District — the WPA wading pool and its survival to 1995 against the national pattern of removals.
2. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — the Merrifield pool complex of 1968.
3. South Bend Tribune briefs, 2001–2002 — the two city pools, Merrifield and Mary Gibbard; the Mary Gibbard pool's 2001 season and its director.
4. City of Mishawaka, 2022 Parks Activity Guide — Mary Gibbard Park's address; the six splash pads.