The water-power town

1837 — 1845

The dam turned a furnace site into an industrial town: In 1837 the works' proprietors dammed the river at the head of the rapids. The state marker at the site gives the dam's measure: 577 feet long and 24 feet thick, built at a cost of $38,000, at the foot of what is now Race Street; mill races were dug on both banks, carrying the river's fall to waterwheels up and down both shores. The effect was out of proportion to the town's size. Through the decade 1835–1845, on the strength of the furnace, the races and the mills that lined them, Mishawaka was — in historian Merle Blue's judgment, carried in the city's history — the largest center of heavy industry in the entire Great Lakes area west of Detroit. The people came with the work: about 100 inhabitants in 1834, a count of 328 reported in 1835, 756 at the union in 1838, and some 862 by the end of the decade; in 1837 a colony of thirty-two migrants, the Brockport colony, arrived together to settle. The town's first federal census count, when the series opens in 1850, would find 1,412 people. The water-power town is the first of Mishawaka's three industrial lives — iron and mills on the races; then the railroad-age factories; then the rubber, woolen and automotive works of the twentieth century — and the dam that started it stood at the center of all three, rebuilt and raised across the years but never moved from its ground.

Sources:

1. Indiana Historical Bureau, marker text for the Mishawaka dam and first bridge — the dam completed 1837, 577 feet long, 24 feet thick, $38,000.
2. Ward Baker, "Mishawaka on the Eve of Conflict," Indiana Magazine of History — the dam at the head of the rapids and races on both sides of the river, with the Mishawaka Hydraulic Company's records and the South Bend Free Press of October 14, 1837 behind the account.
3. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — Merle Blue's judgment on the town's industrial standing 1835–45; the early counts; the Brockport colony of 1837.