The present boundaries

THE CITY AS IT STANDS

One city, one county, one township's ground: Mishawaka lies wholly within St. Joseph County, on ground laid out in Penn Township — the 1838 act itself fixes the town "in the township of Penn," and the census's county-subdivision tables list the city under Penn Township in every volume pulled for this record, from the nineteenth century through the 1980 reports. Its western line touches South Bend's eastern line, the two cities sharing a boundary since the Great Annexation. East of it in the same township stands Osceola, a separate town with its own government; northeast of it lies Granger, an unincorporated place — no city, no town, no municipal government of its own — which is its own later build in this record and is named here only to mark where Mishawaka's story stops. The city's size is carried in the sources with its vintages, and the figures are printed as they stand rather than reconciled: the city's commissioned history gives 17.87 square miles (a density of 2,856.8 persons to the square mile on the 2020 count); the Census Bureau's 2010 gazetteer gave 17.348 square miles in total, 17.00 of land and 0.348 of water; the 2020 gazetteer figures carried in the reference record give 18.25 square miles in total. The differences are the differences of survey, annexation and water's edge across three measurements, and no single one is "the" area of a city whose limits still move by ordinance, as the annexation entry above records.

Sources:

1. Indiana Local Laws (1837–1838), Chap. CCXXXIII — the town fixed in Penn Township; U.S. Census Bureau minor-civil-division tables (1950 and 1970 volumes) — Mishawaka city listed under Penn Township.
2. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — 17.87 square miles and the 2020 density.
3. U.S. Census Bureau gazetteer files, 2010 and 2020 vintages, as carried in the standard reference record — 17.348 and 18.25 square miles respectively.