Electric light — a plant of the city's own, then power from upriver

c. 1903 – 1909

The municipal plant: Mishawaka's first electric age was municipal. The New International Encyclopædia's article on the city, written under the charter of 1899, states the arrangement in one sentence: "The city owns and operates the water-works and electric light plant." The machinery of that ownership is in the city's history: in the first years of the century, barred by law from bonding city property for the improvements it needed, Mayor Melville Mix, Martin Beiger and other civic leaders formed the Mishawaka Public Utilities Company to assume the city's debt and issue the bonds — "the municipal water and electric plants would be owned by the utility and leased to the city," De Kever writes, an arrangement that also delivered the regular police and fire departments and the City Hall that opened in October 1904. The electric plant was thus a documented city system before it was anything else: owned through the city's own utility company, leased back to the city, and answerable at every council meeting — De Kever's account of those years has citizens petitioning the council, meeting after meeting, for extensions of streets, sewers, water lines and streetlights.

Bulk power, from the Hen Island dam: Beside the little municipal plant stood the region's real power project, and its record is the Industrial Revolution leg's power succession, printed here at the size this section needs. In January 1900 Martin Beiger and the South Bend patent attorney James Du Shane formed a company with Eastern investors in the Elkhart Electric Company — the St. Joseph & Elkhart Power Company — to build a dam and powerhouse where Twin Branch Creek met the river, to produce electricity for Mishawaka, South Bend and Elkhart. Construction ran from July 1901 to late October 1903; the dam stood 400 feet long on a 21-foot fall, with a powerhouse 176 feet by 112 and four turbines. The first generation came on 16 December 1903, and the next morning's South Bend Tribune carried the headline the valley still quotes — "Mishawaka Electricity Lights Elkhart": "Elkhart was lighted last night by electricity generated at the St. Joseph & Elkhart Power company's station at the Hen Island dam." The plant became the major source of electricity for Mishawaka and the surrounding area; in 1907 it passed into the Indiana and Michigan Electric Company, and Hen Island took the name Twin Branch. How the city's own small plant and the private river power divided Mishawaka's load year by year — and when the municipal plant itself ceased to generate — is not carried in the record reached for this section; it is named here as a gap, its settling source the Mishawaka Public Utilities Company's own records and the council minutes of the bonding years.

Sources:

1. The New International Encyclopædia, "Mishawaka" (charter-era article, c. 1905) — "The city owns and operates the water-works and electric light plant"; the charter of 1899; population 5,560 in 1900.
2. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — the Mishawaka Public Utilities Company formed under Mayor Mix and Martin Beiger to assume the city's debt and issue bonds, the municipal water and electric plants owned by the utility and leased to the city; the St. Joseph & Elkhart Power Company formed January 1900 by Beiger and James Du Shane with Eastern investors; construction July 1901–October 1903; the dam 400 feet on a 21-foot fall, the powerhouse 176 by 112 feet, four turbines; first electricity 16 December 1903 and the Tribune's "Mishawaka Electricity Lights Elkhart"; the passage to Indiana and Michigan Electric in 1907 and the Twin Branch name.
3. The banked Industrial Revolution section of this build — the power succession whole: the 1837 dam and races, the vanishing steam age, the 1903 hydro plant still generating.