The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1866–present · the neighborhood schools
The boom generation: The 1924 Miskodeed's history counts the city's fifteen booming years plainly: so many more schools were needed that the South Side, Beiger, Battell's new section, the Logan Street and the portable schools were all built within the period. Two of that generation anchor the present map. Battell School, erected 1900 on the north side where Abner Pettit's 1866 frame schoolhouse had stood, took its pupils from the grove school line that reached back to the river's first classrooms; its present building is the one the corporation's 2016 capital inventory dates to 1981. Bingham School was built in 1897, with Mrs.
The present seven: The corporation's seven elementary schools, as its own 2016 capital inventory dates their buildings, are Battell (1981), Beiger (2003 — the present building of a school whose first building belonged to the boom generation), Emmons (1958), Hums (1970), LaSalle (1926), Liberty, and Twin Branch (1952). The inventory's September 2016 enrollments give the neighborhood scale: Beiger 501, Emmons 404, Twin Branch 343, Hums 306, Battell 250. The namesakes of Emmons — the corporation's great superintendent's surname — and of Hums are likewise printed here as names only: the naming records were not reached, and this section does not assert what it has not read.
Twin Branch, the township school the city bought: Twin Branch Elementary's own history page tells the web's clearest boundary story inside the corporation. In 1919 the land was purchased and a two-room school rose at 3810 Lincolnway East — then part of the Penn Township schools, east of the city line. An addition followed in 1920. In 1927 the city annexed eastward and bought Twin Branch from Penn Township; a kindergarten was added in 1946; ground was broken for a new building in 1950 — the corporation's inventory dates the present building 1952 — and in 1962 an eight-room unit was built around the original school. The school's own modern record includes a small, telling episode: in 2001 its principal, Doris Speicher, proposed a balanced calendar and dropped it in the face of parent opposition, as the South Bend Tribune reported at the time. Twin Branch stands in November 2026 as the corporation's easternmost elementary, a Penn Township school by birth and a Mishawaka school by annexation — the boundary in miniature.
The gone schools: The web's earlier elementary map carried schools the present one does not: the South Side and Logan Street schools of the boom, the portables, Bingham, and Mary Phillips School, which stands in the 1968 record among Main Junior High's feeders.
Sources:
- School City of Mishawaka, 2016 referendum and capital filing (in.gov): building occupancy years and September 2016 enrollments.
- Twin Branch Elementary School, the school's own history page, School City of Mishawaka.
- The Miskodeed, 1924 edition, "The Mishawaka Schools," via the Internet Archive.
- South Bend Tribune, Twin Branch balanced-calendar report, 2001; Main Junior High feeder reporting, 1968, via the newspaper record.