The Story of Mishawaka: From the Rapids to the Present Day

Mishawaka is a city that iron drafted and water power filled in. Where the St. Joseph River gathers itself over a fall of broken rock — the rapids at the head of which the town was planted — a Potawatomi village stood on the south bank, and the village's name, in the form the settlers took it up, is the name the city still carries. On the strength of bog iron found in the swamps south of the river, a Detroit promoter built a blast furnace at the rapids in 1833–34, the first successful iron furnace in Indiana, and platted a town around his works. Within five years four separate town plats stood on the two banks, and in 1838 the legislature gathered them into one town under the village's name. The dam and the mill races made Mishawaka, for a decade, the largest center of heavy industry in the Great Lakes country west of Detroit; the railroad, the woolen mills and the rubber works carried the factory town forward after the bog ore gave out. Town government ran for sixty-four years before the voters accepted a city charter in 1899. The twentieth century doubled the city twice over — once on the factory boom of the 1920s, once on the annexations and suburbs of the postwar decades — and the twenty-first has carried it past fifty thousand people, the most it has ever held. What follows is the whole of it, in order.

The Story of Mishawaka section as banked runs from the rapids to the charter of 1899 with the early valley, the floods, the wars at home, the firms, and the remaking carried in other sections or not at all. This addendum supplies those beats at spine size, in the Story of Mishawaka section's order, so the backbone carries them itself.