The Speculation Era and Its Bust: The First Buyers Named

The boom that made Mishawaka was a paper boom laid over an iron furnace, and its first buyers have names. Alanson M. Hurd came from Detroit and built the blast furnace on the south bank in 1833, platting the town of St. Joseph Iron Works around it; the next year the town's leading spirits — Judge John J. Deming, Col. John H. Orr, J. E. Hollister and Philo Hurd, Dwight Deming's memoir in Chapman's county history names them — organized the St. Joseph Iron Company to manufacture iron from the bog ore that lay in the vicinity. Across the river a second plat, Indiana City, was laid on the north bank, and additions multiplied on both sides through the middle 1830s, the classic speculation-era pattern: lots sold on the strength of the furnace, the water power, and the roads the corridors section follows. The speculation was a county fever, not a town one. Judge Deming himself laid out the town of Portage on the river below South Bend in July 1834 and branched, in Chapman's words, into "merchandising, milling and land speculations" — and Deming is the bust's named local face, because Chapman follows him through it: "When the hard times of 1837-'8 struck the country, he found himself, like all the enterprising men, carrying a heavier load than he was able to bear, and finally did come out about where he started in, and his town of Portage did about the same thing." Portage died of the panic. Mishawaka did not, and the difference is the entry's point: the furnace was real. The General Assembly's incorporating act of 17 February 1838 — passed in the bust's depth, not the boom's — merged the Iron Works, Indiana City and the additions into one town called Mishawaka, a consolidation of paper plats around a working water power. The recovery stands in figures the town's own press printed: the Mishawaka Enterprise of 5 March 1859 and the St. Joseph Valley Register of 17 March 1859 valued the manufactures of 1858 at $407,000 in total — flour $125,000, iron castings $30,000, wagons and the rest behind them — the account Ward Baker's study of the town on the eve of the Civil War preserves. The speculation era thus prints whole in this record: a reserved section sold as town lots, named promoters riding the national credit boom, the hard times of 1837–38 taking the purely paper town downriver and the overextended judge with it, and the iron town surviving to be worth counting, in its own newspapers, twenty years on.