The road, the river road that never came, and the railroad: the transport beats

1826 — 1858 · THREE BEATS AND THE WORKING DETAIL

The river first: Before any road, the St. Joseph itself was the highway — the ford at the rapids where the trail between the upper river and the Kankakee country came down to the water, and then, in the town's first decades, a working river road: the county record's steamboat lists run from 1832, and before the railroad all the merchandise for the valley's merchants was received by way of the river. The dam of 1837 that powered the town also fixed the river's terms at this reach, and the races — the town's own dug water channels — are mill works, not navigation: no lock was ever built to carry boats past the Mishawaka rapids.

The road beat: The road age reached the valley on paper granted by a treaty. The Michigan Road — Madison on the Ohio to Michigan City on the lake, through Indianapolis — was granted by the Potawatomi treaty of 16 October 1826, surveyed in rival routes, and fixed on 13 January 1830 by the route through South Bend, four miles below this ground: the great thoroughfare of northern Indiana ran past Mishawaka's door, not through its plat, and its working detail is the stage era's own — immigrants, speculators and merchants moving on foot, on horseback, by lumbering stage coach and in heavy Pennsylvania wagons, in Howard's county history's telling, and, as late as the fall of 1851, a stagecoach trip from South Bend to Indianapolis on the Michigan Road requiring five days over mud, swamp and log bridges. Mishawaka's own chartered road ran east: the Vistula Road, for which the legislature in February 1832 appointed commissioners to survey and locate a road from South Bend by way of the mouth of the Elkhart River toward Vistula (Toledo) on Maumee Bay — a road that crossed this townsite, whose line west of Baugo Bay flows into present Lincolnway West and State Road 933 in Mishawaka, and which the Lincoln Highway followed into the city in 1913. The plank-road era is documented on the valley's roads at the same working strength: the Michigan Road from South Bend to Plymouth became a plank road, with its toll houses, and prospered its roadside towns until the planks rotted and were taken up; and the Michigan City and South Bend Plank Road Company, chartered in the 1850s, was issuing its own notes by October 1858 — a toll-road corporation substantial enough to print money on its credit, its largest shareholder the Michigan banker Daniel Ball.

The canal beat — a printed negative: No canal ever reached this ground. Indiana's canal age built exactly two systems through to completion — the Whitewater Canal in the southeast and the Wabash and Erie Canal, which reached Fort Wayne, the nearest canal water to Mishawaka, and ran on to Evansville — and the St. Joseph valley's canal exists only as surveys: the Erie and Michigan scheme, surveyed in 1829, 1830, 1876 and again in 1915, and the Fort Wayne-to-Michigan survey among the eight projects of the 1836 Internal Improvements Act. A generation later the proposal was still alive on paper: the 1914-era federal survey of a Lake Erie–Lake Michigan waterway drew its northern route from Fort Wayne through Warsaw, Goshen, Mishawaka and South Bend to Trail Creek at Michigan City — Mishawaka named on a canal route that was drawn, costed and never dug. There was no canal groundbreaking here, no first boat, no toll table, no packet dock; the town that a canal would have made rich was made by a dam instead, and when through transport came in earnest it came by rail.

The railroad beat, in brief: On 4 October 1851 the Michigan Southern's first train came into Mishawaka behind the locomotive John Strycker, as the Story of Mishawaka section's railroad entry carries — the one leg of the trilogy that arrived, arriving twenty years after the road surveys and outlasting every plank and towpath scheme the valley drew.

Sources:

1. Leon M. Gordon II, "Effects of the Michigan Road on Northern Indiana, 1830–1860," Indiana Magazine of History — the 1826 treaty grant, the rival surveys and the South Bend route chosen 13 January 1830; the planked Logansport–Rochester stretch of about 1852 and its failure; the five-day South Bend–Indianapolis stagecoach trip of fall 1851.
2. Timothy Edward Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907) — the Michigan Road's traffic at working size (foot, horseback, stage coach, Pennsylvania wagons) and the South Bend–Plymouth plank road, its toll houses and their removal.
3. Indiana Historical Bureau, The Indiana Historian, "Canal Mania" (June 1997) — the two completed systems (Whitewater; Wabash and Erie), the Erie and Michigan surveys of 1829, 1830, 1876 and 1915, and the 1836 act's Fort Wayne-to-Michigan survey.
4. Charles Redway Dryer, "The Maumee-Wabash Waterway," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 9 (1919), and the Canal Society of Indiana's account of the 1914 survey — the proposed northern route from Fort Wayne through Goshen, Mishawaka and South Bend to Michigan City, a proposal never built.
5. The Vistula Road record — the Indiana act of February 1832 appointing commissioners for the South Bend–to–Toledo road, its course into Mishawaka as Lincolnway West / State Road 933, and the Lincoln Highway's 1913 routing over it into the city. Heritage Auctions' record of the Michigan City and South Bend Plank Road Company — chartered in the 1850s, its notes of 29 October 1858, Daniel Ball its largest shareholder.
6. The county record's St. Joseph River steamcraft lists and merchant-freight account, as carried in the transportation record — river freight from 1832 and all merchandise by river before the railroad.