One town, one name: the act of 1838

FEBRUARY 17, 1838

The legislature made Mishawaka a single town, and gave it the village's name: On February 17, 1838, an act of the General Assembly was approved uniting the several towns and additions at the rapids under one name and one incorporation (Indiana Local Laws 1837–38, Chapter CCXXXIII, page 410). The act's own words, as Howard prints them: "That the name of the town of St. Joseph Iron Works and the name of the town of Indiana City, in St. Joseph county, be, and the same are hereby changed to that of Mishawaka; and that all the lots now laid out on either side of the Big St. Joseph river … be included within the incorporation of the town of St. Joseph Iron Works (hereafter to be known by the name of Mishawaka)." The gathered town stood, in the act's framing, at the head of the Mishawaka rapids, in the township of Penn. Three things about the act deserve their lines. The name it chose was neither the company's nor any proprietor's: it was the Potawatomi name, already carried by the post office and by Barbee's plat. The corporation it continued was the 1835 incorporation of the iron-works town — the union enlarged and renamed a going government rather than founding a new one, which is why the town government's life, when it ended in 1899, was counted at sixty-four years. And the town it made was a two-bank town by law as it already was in fact, one municipality across a river — the form Mishawaka has kept ever since.

Sources:

1. Indiana, Local Laws (1837–1838), Chap. CCXXXIII, p. 410 — the union act of February 17, 1838, as quoted in Howard's county history and cited in Baker's article.
2. Timothy Edward Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), Chapter X, Sec. 6, "Union of the Towns" — the act's text and the four plats it gathered.
3. Ward Baker, "Mishawaka on the Eve of Conflict," Indiana Magazine of History — the act's citation and effect.