Four paper towns, gathered into one name

1833–1838 · THE RIVAL PLATS

The crowd of towns: Before Mishawaka was one town it was at least four, each a separate plat filed at the recorder's office with its own proprietor, surveyor and name. Alanson Hurd's village of 1833 was St. Joseph Iron Works. Indiana City was platted on the north bank. Taylor's Addition and the Fowler additions followed. And the first plat to carry the name Mishawaka was a rival's, not Hurd's: William Barbee and Henry Harman's "Plat of the Town of Mishawaka" of April 1835, laid in federal ground east of the school section — read by Howard as an independent town, not an addition, since "the name of the St. Joseph Iron Works nowhere appears" in it, while Chapman, forty-five years earlier, had called it simply an addition. The two county histories divide on the paper's intent and the division stands unreconciled. What ended the crowd was a statute: the union act of 17 February 1838 gathered the founding filings into one corporation "merged under the happily chosen name of Mishawaka" — a competitor's name, chosen over the founder's. Chapman dates the union a year late, 1839, against the act's own date; the act governs, and the slip stands in print because it stands in the older county history.

Sources: the Land section of this history — Hurd's plat dedication of 15 July 1833; the Barbee–Harman plat of April 1835 and Howard's and Chapman's division over its intent; the union act of 17 February 1838 (Local Laws 1837–38, ch. CCXXXIII) and Chapman's 1839 dating printed against it.