The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
MEASURED 1907 · THE FALL THE CITY IS NAMED FOR
The measure: On Howard's reading of the name (above), Mishawaka means Big Rapids. Howard's own history also does the arithmetic, and the arithmetic is the oddity: "The actual fall of the river for a few rods at the rapids," he writes, "has been found to be two feet and nine inches." The natural rapids at Mishawaka were not a cataract; they were a riffle — fast, shallow water over broken rock, good for a ford and a fishery and, unaided, for almost no machinery at all. What made the place a power site was concentration: the dam of 1837, 577 feet long and 24 feet thick, built at a cost of $38,000 just above the rapids, gathered the river's whole flow behind one head and let it out through races on both banks, from which any mill lot could draw its fall. The marker at the site lists what the races drove — flour, lumber, woolen goods, iron, boots, shoes, furniture, coffins, barrel staves, saddles and harness, and wagons — the product list of a factory city raised on less than three feet of falling water. The name promises a cataract; the record delivers a measured slope of thirty-three inches, and an industrial century built on the difference between the two.
Sources: the Industrial Revolution section of this history — Timothy Edward Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, vol. 1 (1907), ch. X: the fall of two feet and nine inches; the first dam and bridge by private means; the races on both banks; Indiana Historical Bureau marker 71.1968.1, "First Dam Across the St. Joseph River / Power Race" — the dam completed 1837, 577 feet long, 24 feet thick, $38,000, and the race-side product list as the marker gives it.