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JULY 1909
The adoption ceremony, as the record keeps it: The Pageant that closed the city's founding celebration in July 1909 is the Events section's and the Story of Mishawaka section's; what belongs to this section is the system it switched on. The day — the Historical Pageant and Fourth of July Celebration, staged around the opening of the Hotel Mishawaka — culminated at eight in the evening, in the city's own history's words, "when the city's new electric streetlights were turned on for the first time." The act was given to the celebration's own figure: following Mayor Charles Frank's remarks, the young woman playing Princess Mishawaka turned the switch, and the lights "illuminated streets on both sides of the river" — the crowd of five thousand jammed into Main and the nearby streets roaring its approval while the band played "The Star-Spangled Banner." The entry prints the ceremony because the ceremony is the adoption record: a municipal lighting system, complete on both banks, presented to the whole city at a single switch on a single night, six years after the river plant's first current and within the decade of the municipal plant's documented existence. Which plant's current lit those first streetlights — the city's own, the river company's, or the two in their documented partnership — the record reached does not say, and the question is carried here as part of the electric-light gap named above.
Sources:
- Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — the Historical Pageant of July 1909 closing at 8 p.m. with the city's new electric streetlights turned on for the first time; Princess Mishawaka turning the switch after Mayor Frank's remarks; streets on both sides of the river illuminated; the crowd of five thousand.
- The banked Spine and Events sections of this build — the pageant whole, carried there; this entry conforms to them.