Mishawaka High School: the Cavemen's school, whole

1874–present · 1202 Lincoln Way East

The second building: The First and Hill building served a growing town for a generation, and the record dates its successor two ways: the high school's own history page dates the new high school on Lincolnway West to 1910, while the state marker and the 1924 yearbook date its erection and first occupation to 1911 — "In 1911, when the High School was first occupied," the Miskodeed reads. Both statements stand. The building held four hundred students, with a gymnasium, shops and domestic-science rooms in the basement — the system's documented vocational beginning — and seven teachers; its principal was Mary D. Welch, and the first class to graduate from it, in 1911, numbered twenty-five. The old building at First and Hill became Main School.

Outgrowing it in a decade: By the spring of 1922 the high school's enrollment had reached 545 in a building built for 400. P. C. Emmons, the superintendent who arrived in 1921 from ten years as superintendent at Kendallville, formed the committee that chose the answer: a new site on Lincolnway East, between Wenger and Gernhart, four square blocks including the track and field. The present Mishawaka High School rose there at a cost its current administration gives as $800,000. Its first students crossed the threshold in August 1924 — a first day the school marked a century later, on 14 August 2024, with a ribbon cutting at which Mayor David Wood declared the date "Mishawaka High School Centennial School First Day of School Day" and called the school "the heart and soul of Mishawaka." The building was dedicated in the fall of 1924; the auditorium was finished in 1925; its first principal, C. C. Cauble, had held the chair since 1921; Charles H. Kern, to whom the class of 1931 dedicated its Miskodeed, held it by 1931. While the east side's Beiger Elementary was finished, its pupils temporarily used classrooms in the new high school's east side. Gold letters went up on the building's front in 1931, and a stadium rose behind it in 1939, lighted from the start, at a cost of about $130,000 — the field later named Steele Field.

The Cavemen: The school's name for itself dates to the old building's last years. The corporation's own account, published in its October 2015 newsletter on the telling of former coach, teacher and principal Robert D. Smith, places it at a Mishawaka–South Bend High School football game at Cartier Field in 1922 or 1923, scoreless at halftime, when a fan named Curt Johnson held up a sign: "OUR TEAM WILL FIGHT LIKE CAVEMEN!" Mishawaka won; the name was adopted and kept, and the school believes it is the only Cavemen mascot in the country. Johnson afterward ran a greenhouse on South Spring Street. The story stands here as the corporation tells it, attributed to its own newsletter and its own elder.

Powell, 1887: The high school's early classes hold a first of wider reach. In 1887 a Mishawaka graduate named Powell — the record reached carries her by surname — was, on the Mishawaka Enterprise's account of the commencement of 10 June 1887, the first African-American graduate of any high school in northern Indiana, one of ten graduates in her class. The Enterprise wrote that "great interest centered in the appearance of this promising young pupil, not only from the fact that she is the first colored scholar ever graduated in northern Indiana, but because of her high standing as a pupil." Powell afterward taught at the Brownsville School in Cass County, Michigan, before returning to Mishawaka to care for family. The account stands on the South Bend Tribune's 2003 retrospective, drawing on the Enterprise and on Powell family historian John Charles Bryant.

The postwar school: Enrollment reached 1,985 in 1958 — the crowding that had already, in 1955, ended the school's taking of Penn Township tuition students, as the Penn entry below prints. The building kept pace in pieces: the original gymnasium was remodeled in 1959, at about $600,000, to hold two full-size floors and 4,000 seats; a Baldwin electric organ, the Lions Club's 1950 gift in memory of W. W. French, stood in the auditorium; the whole school was rewired with fluorescent lighting in 1953–54 at $125,000. An east wing of nine classrooms, a reading laboratory, a foreign-language laboratory, a music room and a study hall, built in 1963 at $650,000, was dedicated on 26 April 1964, with enrollment at 2,054 — the school's documented peak. From 1976 to 1980 a four-year modernization costing just under four million dollars renewed the auditorium, cafeteria, gymnasium, library, administrative offices, industrial education wing, hallways, classrooms and stadium; the high school's own history records that its freshmen sat in the middle schools until 1984, when a further two-story addition — music department below, classrooms above, an expanded kitchen and cafeteria — was completed between the cafeteria and the industrial education department. A gym and pool complex followed in January 1988, with wrestling and weight rooms and a tenth-of-a-mile indoor track; a science and technology wing in the fall of 1999 brought eleven science laboratories and a television studio. The building now totals 319,949 square feet on 16.36 acres. A further renewal round ran from 2017 into 2020, under the corporation's 2016 building program printed in the corporation's entry below.

The school in numbers and honors: The high school's enrollment, at dated figures: 1,692 in 2007; 1,476 in 2013–14, when 57.4 percent of its students were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch; 1,462 in the corporation's September 2016 filing; 1,437 in 2023–24; and 1,327 in the most recent federal count republished — a long, slow decline from the 2,054 of 1964. Its documented state championships stand in the IHSAA record: boys' cross country in 1946; volleyball in 1980, 1983 and 1988; wrestling in 1991, 2008 and 2010. Its colors are maroon and white; its newspaper is the Alltold; its yearbook remains the Miskodeed. The school stands in November 2026 in its 1924 building, renovated and added to across a century: the oldest continuously occupied high-school building in the city's web, and the one institution in this section that every other school in the city, in every system, measures itself against.

Sources:

1. Mishawaka High School, "History of Mishawaka High School," the school's own history page; centennial coverage and Principal Chad Brugh's account of the building's cost, 2024.
2. Indiana Historical Bureau, marker 71.1976.1, "Mishawaka High School."
3. School City of Mishawaka newsletter, October 2015, the Cavemen account of Robert D. Smith.
4. South Bend Tribune, 2003 retrospective on the Powell graduation, drawing on the Mishawaka Enterprise, 10 June 1887, via the ProQuest newspaper record.
5. School City of Mishawaka, 2016 referendum and capital filing, Indiana Department of Local Government Finance gateway (in.gov): enrollment and building inventory.
6. National Center for Education Statistics figures for Mishawaka High School as republished (enrollment trend 2007–2025; 2023–24 count); IHSAA state championship record by school.
7. The Miskodeed, 1924 and 1931 editions, via the Internet Archive.