Institute No. 1, the Main Street school, and the high school's opening, 1868–1878

1868–1878 · the graded school and the first public high school

The Main Street building: Institute No. 1 served until the late 1860s, when the town built the school long remembered as the Main Street school — the building that in its later life became Main School and then Main Junior High. The record gives the building two dates, and both stand: the 1924 Miskodeed dates it 1868, at a cost of $50,000, and calls it "the pride of the 1,800 people of Mishawaka"; the high school's own history page dates the first high-school building 1869, on Hill Street between First and Second, holding grades one through twelve. Vincent Brunner's city history, quoted in the yearbook, tells of a fire that broke out in the building in the early 1870s. The building and the high school department that grew inside it are dated differently by different keepers of the record because they were different events; this section prints the dates as each source gives them rather than splitting the difference.

The high school's opening: The fuller account carried in reference works gives the building's interior: a three-story school at the corner of Hill Street and West Second Street (now Lincoln Way West), on the site later occupied by the Main Junior High playground at 301 Lincoln Way West — Whitson Hall on the third floor, used only for entertainments and graduation exercises; five rooms on the second floor, two of them grade rooms and three for the high school; five more classrooms on the first. The Indiana Historical Bureau's marker at the present high school states the department's own dates plainly: "Mishawaka's first public high school was opened in 1874 with an enrollment of sixty students. Accredited in 1876, the school graduated its first class in June, 1878." The fuller account carried in reference works adds the machinery: the high school was proposed by the town board in May 1873; the first school board was W. W. Butterworth and J. Q. C. VanDenbosh; Jacob Beal was the first principal and E. L. Hallock the superintendent; six teachers staffed the school, two of them themselves students. The building of record was a three-story red-brick school at First and Hill. A graded public high school, accredited within two years of opening and graduating a class within four, was an early achievement for a town of Mishawaka's size, and the marker — erected by the state in 1976, the high school's own centennial era — remains the settled public statement of the founding.

The north side: Across the river, the first school stood in an oak grove; in 1866 Abner Pettit built a two-story frame schoolhouse where the Battell addition later rose, and it served until Battell School was erected in 1900. The north-side schools' great figure is Lydia Brinnsmaid, who taught in them for fifty years before her retirement in 1916 — a half-century in one neighborhood's classrooms, spanning the frame schoolhouse and the brick school that replaced it.

Sources:

1. Indiana Historical Bureau, historical marker 71.1976.1, "Mishawaka High School," text as published by the Bureau.
2. The Miskodeed, 1924 edition, "The Mishawaka Schools," via the Internet Archive.
3. Mishawaka High School, "History of Mishawaka High School," the school's own history page.
4. "Mishawaka High School" and "School City of Mishawaka," reference articles and their cited sources.