The rapids at the bend

THE GEOGRAPHIC PREMISE

Everything here is downstream of one fall of water: The St. Joseph River comes down out of Michigan flowing southwest, and at this place its course is broken by a natural rapids — a stretch of fast, shallow water over rock — before it runs on westward past the great south bend of the river, four miles below, and turns north for Lake Michigan. The rapids did three things for the place before anyone built on it. They made a ford: the crossing where the trail between the upper river and the Kankakee country came down to the water. They made a fishery and a hunting ground, in a bottom of timber and swamp rich in game. And they made, for anyone who arrived with machinery, a head of water power waiting for a dam. A village stood at the rapids for the first two reasons. A town was platted at the rapids for the third.

The settlement that grew here was a two-bank settlement from the start, because the rapids are crossed, not occupied: the furnace and the first plat went on the south bank, and within three years rival plats stood on the north bank facing them, joined first by the ford and then, from 1837, by a bridge. The river is the city's main street in everything but name — the dam, the races, the bridges and the parks all answer to it — and the entries below keep returning to it, because Mishawaka's history is the story of what was built at this one fall of water. Four miles downriver stands South Bend, the county seat and the larger city; it is a separate city with a built history of its own, and where its works, wages and boundaries touch this record they are named as South Bend's and left there.

Sources:

1. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History (city-commissioned history, City of Mishawaka) — the rapids, the ford and the village site at the crossing.
2. Timothy Edward Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, Vol. 1 (Lewis Publishing, 1907), Chapter X, "The City of Mishawaka" — the two-bank plats at the head of the rapids.
3. Ward Baker, "Mishawaka on the Eve of Conflict," Indiana Magazine of History — the town "lying along both sides of the St. Joseph River, four miles east of South Bend."