The city today, in brief

THE PRESENT DAY

The rapids' town at fifty-one thousand: The Mishawaka of November 2026 is the largest Mishawaka there has ever been — 51,063 people at the last census, an estimated 51,226 at July 1, 2025 — and its shape is the sum of the entries above: a nineteenth-century industrial core on both banks at the rapids, a streetcar-and-factory city laid over it, and a suburban and commercial city annexed around both, out to Grape Road and Cleveland Road in the north. The river is again the front of the city: the riverfront parks, among them the park named for Mayor Beutter, run along the dam's ground, and the city hall that governs it all sits at 100 Lincolnway West in a renovated insurance building, a few blocks from the furnace site. The works that remain keep the pattern the furnace set — the AM General plant's military trucks, the surviving manufacturers of the Ball Band ground's successors and the Edison Lakes and Grape Road corridors — while the great names of the factory age, Ball Band among them, stand in this record as history, their plant closed in 1997 and its buildings imploded in 2000. What the city's next century makes of the same assets — a river, a fall of water, a name older than the town, and a position four miles from a larger city it has never joined — is the story the sections that follow this spine will document as it happens. The Story of Mishawaka section ends where it began: at the rapids, where the village stood, the furnace rose, and the city stands.

Sources:

1. The entries of this spine and their sources, gathered: the 2020 count and Vintage 2025 estimate (population entry); the present government and City Hall (government entries); the Ball Band closing of 1997 and implosion of June 17, 2000 (Ball Band section of this record, on the federal court's findings in Chrapliwy v. Uniroyal, 458 F. Supp. 252, and the city record).