Mishawaka, Indiana
Timeline
923 dated events, in order. Each gives the passage that dates it and a link to its full account.
The first 199 dated events are on this page. Scroll to load the next decades, or open 1880s and later decades directly.
Before 1700 4 dated mentions
- 1679The Mission Era: Priests and Missionaries on the River, 1679–1857
In December 1679 René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, came down the St. Joseph River and crossed the St. Joseph–Kankakee portage at the river's bend — the passage the tribes leg carries whole.
- 1686The post that was not here: Fort St. Joseph at Niles, and the empty rapids
In 1686 King Louis XIV granted land to the Jesuits for the Mission de Saint-Joseph, where Father Claude Allouez ministered to the Potawatomi.
- 1691Fort St. Joseph at Niles: the fort that governed the valley
The post: On the south side of present Niles, Michigan, where the lower St. Joseph River passes the crossing of the Sauk Trail and the Grand River Trail, near the portage that joins the Great Lakes watershed to the Mississippi's, the French in 1691 built Fort St. Joseph beside the Jesuit mission that already stood there…
- 1691The fort beat: one fort for the valley, none for this ground, and the treaties that closed its era
The founding, without a dedication: The valley's fort was founded as an act of administration, not ceremony: the French sent soldiers to the Saint-Joseph mission in 1691 to expand the fur trade and solidify their Native relations, and Fort St. Joseph — mission, garrison and trading post together — stood from that year at present Niles.
18th century 2 dated mentions
1760s
- 1763The battles of the valley, each its own beat — and none of them here
The capture of Fort St. Joseph, 25 May 1763: In Pontiac's Rebellion the valley's one fort fell to the valley's own people: Potawatomi warriors took Fort St. Joseph at Niles and carried off its British garrison, Ensign Schlosser prisoner among them.
1780s
- 1781The traders before the post: the valley line, person by person
Antoine LeClare: Anson calls LeClare the first resident of the St. Joseph Valley: he settled a few miles upriver from Fort St. Joseph in 1781, soon after the fort's destruction — the line's first name, at the fort's own ground.
19th century 193 dated mentions
1810s
- 1810–1872Norman Eddy: the physician who carried the town to Washington
The tie, exactly: Norman S. Eddy was not born in Mishawaka — he was born December 10, 1810, at Scipio, New York — and this section claims him at the strength the record gives: he was formed here as a professional.
- 1816The frame: meridian, state line, and the survey of the township
The act of Congress of 19 April 1816 that enabled Indiana's statehood set the state's northern boundary as an east-and-west line through a point ten miles north of the southern extreme of Lake Michigan, and by an act of 2 March 1827 Congress authorized the President to have that line ascertained and marked.
- 1818Commitment: the law's local course
An act of 1818 empowered the circuit courts to conduct inquests into cases of suspected insanity and to appoint guardians for persons adjudged insane; later acts gave the courts power to commit such persons to the state hospitals.
- 1818The grave that is not there
Mishawaka's most famous grave belongs to a woman who never lived: The monument the citizens of Mishawaka erected in 1932 — a statue on a native boulder provided by the Daughters of the American Revolution, its tablet given by the Lions Club, standing today on the riverwalk at Lincoln Park…
1820s
- 1821The cessions, instrument by instrument; the chiefs' deaths; and the removal
The Treaty of Chicago, 29 August 1821, ceded some five million acres of Michigan country and left Indiana's St. Joseph valley in Potawatomi title.
- 1821The county asylum: Mishawaka's share
Care of the mind began as poor relief, and the relief was the county's: Indiana's act of 1821 that provided for houses for the employment of the poor opened the county asylums to the insane as well, and St. Joseph County's asylum stood, in every one of its forms, on the far side of the river: the rented houses in…
- 1826The road, the river road that never came, and the railroad: the transport beats
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…
- 1828The cession as a transaction, and the reserve test
The townsite's Indian title was extinguished by one instrument, and the instrument's own terms are the record: The treaty concluded 20 September 1828 "at the Missionary Establishments upon the St. Joseph, of Lake Michigan" — Carey Mission, by present Niles…
- 1829–1863Colonization: the state's Liberia machinery, and this county's answer
The Indiana Colonization Society, organized at Indianapolis in 1829 as an auxiliary of the American Colonization Society, promoted the removal of free Black Hoosiers to Liberia through its newspaper, The Colonizationist , under John D. Defrees.
1830s
- 1830Into market: the land office and the first entries
Surveyed land could be bought, and the county's land was bought fast: Chapman's county history states the opening plainly: "The lands in St. Joseph county, although ceded to the United States Government some years previous by the Pottawatomie Indians, did not come into market until the spring of 1830.
- 1830Where the paper lives: recorder, surveyor, and the archives
Mishawaka's land paper has always lived in South Bend, and the county built its archive deliberately: The county seat is four miles down the river, and the townsite's deeds, plats and mortgages were recorded there from the beginning, in the office of the county recorder…
- 1830The first cabins, 1830–1832
Settlement reached the rapids a few years before the works did: The earliest white settlers near the future townsite came in 1830 — the families the record names as Coe, Mote and Skinner — followed in 1831 by families from Ireland.
- 1830–1860The First Courts, the First Sheriff, and the First Jail — the County Frame Whole
The first term: St. Joseph County was formed by act of the General Assembly approved 29 January 1830, its organization effective 1 April 1830, and its Board of Justices assembled on 27 August 1830 at the house of Alexis Coquillard, with L. M. Taylor…
- 1831–1881The law over their heads: the 1831 bond law, Article XIII, and the 1851 referendum
The regime began with a bond: Indiana's act of 1831 required every Black person coming into the state to register and to give a bond of five hundred dollars, with sureties, conditioned on good behavior and self-support — a sum beyond the reach of nearly any newcomer, which was the point.
- 1831–2012The chronological ladder — Mishawaka's firms, oldest first
1831–32 — Joseph Pemberton's lathe. A settler's lathe turning chairs and bedposts near the rapids, counted by historian Janice Bridges, in De Kever's account, as the first manufacturing in the area — before the town, before the furnace.
- 1832Bog iron and Alanson Hurd
Alanson M. Hurd of Detroit heard of the deposits and, in the summer of 1832, sent William Earl to scout them. Earl found a large deposit near the Twin Branches, three miles upriver.
- 1832The township frame: Penn Township's series
The city sits inside a township older than itself, and the township counts everyone — inside the line and out: Penn Township was one of the three original townships laid out by the county board on 6 May 1832 — Penn taking all of the county east of Range Two East in the first division…
- 1832–1845The iron system: ore, charcoal, and water
Alanson M. Hurd of Detroit sent William Earl to scout the deposits in the summer of 1832; Earl found a large deposit near the Twin Branches, three miles upriver.
- 1832–1848Before the town: the county's first wars
The Black Hawk War predates the town: The St. Joseph Iron Company's townsite on the south bank of the river was platted in 1833; the Black Hawk War was fought in 1832.
- 1832–todayThe Vistula Road: the state road of 1832, and Second Street
The town was bisected by a road before it was much of a town: In February 1832 the Indiana legislature appointed commissioners "to survey, mark and locate a road from South Bend… by way of the mouth of the Elkhart River… and the county seat of Lagrange County to the east line of this State, in the direction of Vistula…
- 1833The school section: how the townsite was bought
Indiana sold its school lands through a machinery of its own, modeled on the federal example but run by state and county officers: the congressional township's school trustees subdivided the section into numbered lots and fixed a minimum price for each division, and the county's school commissioner conducted the sales…
- 1833Hurd's plat as an instrument
The founding document of the city is a surveyor's description, and Howard prints it whole: Alanson M. Hurd's dedication of the village of St. Joseph Iron Works, signed 15 July 1833, describes a plat of fifty-two and seven-tenths acres: its exterior line "begins on the top of the bluff, on the south side of the St.…
- 1833The addition system: the legal frame of a paper town
The founding generation's filings can be counted whole, because Howard enumerates them: Hurd's original plat (1833); its re-filing with additions on three sides (1835); Hurd's out-lots (1835); Barbee & Harman's town plat (1835); Taylor's Addition (1836); Indiana City (1836); Fowler's Addition (1836)…
- 1833The village of St. Joseph Iron Works
The town was the works, wearing a plat: In the summer of 1833 Hurd platted his town on the south bank around the furnace — the founding is dated July 15, 1833 — and named it for the enterprise: the Village of St. Joseph Iron Works.
- 1833The firms, at spine size: the cluster beats
The furnace and the water-power cluster: The cluster begins where the Story of Mishawaka section begins: Hurd's blast furnace of 1833–34, the first successful iron furnace in Indiana, blown in on bog ore and charcoal, and the dam of 1837 — 577 feet long, $38,000…
- 1833The townsite the schoolchildren owned
Indiana sold its school lands through its own machinery, and Chapman's Penn Township history gives the transaction its fullest surviving form: "This land (being school land), where Mishawaka now stands, upon petition of the settlers to the School Commissioner, was purchased Jan. 1, 1833, by Mr. Hurd, who had promised…
- 1833–1838The four plats: two towns on each bank, 1833–1838
The south bank was platted first, around a furnace: Alanson M. Hurd bought the 640-acre School Section 16 on 1 January 1833 at $1.25 an acre, and in the summer of 1833, as his blast furnace rose, the village of St. Joseph Iron Works was platted to the south — founded, in the city's commissioned history's dating, on 15 July 1833.
- 1833–1838Four paper towns, gathered into one name
Alanson Hurd's village of 1833 was St. Joseph Iron Works. Indiana City was platted on the north bank.
- 1833–1927The towns the city absorbed: four plats, a furnace village, and the ground that came in after
The first was a company community in the strict sense: the village of St. Joseph Iron Works, platted in the summer of 1833 around Alanson Hurd's blast furnace, its first population — about a hundred residents in 1834…
- 1833–todayThe Belgians: the city within the city
The chain began with a priest's letters: Father Louis de Seille, the first Belgian in the St. Joseph River valley, came to America in 1832 and in 1833 sent letters home to Belgium encouraging his former altar boys to follow.
- 1834The crossings, whole
Before the first bridge there was a ferry, and the marker record gives the crossing's whole early course in four structures: The Indiana Historical Bureau's First Bridge marker (71.1968.2), which stood at the southwest corner of Main and Mishawaka Avenue, records that a ferry worked the crossing from 1834…
- 1834First Presbyterian Church: The Oldest Organization in the City
The founding: The First Presbyterian Church was organized on 25 July 1834, while Mishawaka was still the iron-works village of St. Joseph, by the Hurd, Dean and Smith families with the Rev. Noah M. Wells, who had come to the village as a furnace supervisor, and it worshipped first in Philo Hurd's home and in Earl's Tavern.
- 1834The county frame: the Huggart Settlement is not Mishawaka's
The county's earliest Black settlement stood in the south county, and this entry prints the boundary so the Mishawaka file neither claims it nor loses it: Frederick A. Karst's article in the Indiana Magazine of History , read first-hand, documents the Huggart Settlement: Samuel Huggart bought eighty acres at the La…
- 1834The first houses: two hotels, one saloon outside the limits, and the temperance fight of 1834
The saloon that started the argument: Timothy Edward Howard's History of St. Joseph County (1907) opens its temperance chapter with Mishawaka: "In 1834 a similar society was organized in Mishawaka" — a temperance society, a year after the town's founding…
- 1834Flour first: the mill-race ground the food trade started on
Orlando Hurd opened the Mishawaka Hotel in 1834, and "the traveling public were furnished with ample entertainment in the wilderness of the St. Joseph Valley," as the 1875 county atlas puts it; the first preaching in the settlement was held in a tavern kept by Mr. Finch, the same atlas records.
- 1834Temperance as an actor on this plant
The crusade's local course, at pointer size: Mishawaka organized a temperance society in 1834, the year of its first iron furnace, and took offense at a saloon opened just outside its limits; the fight's whole course — the society, the Washingtonians, the dry-law controversies…
- 1834–1868First classrooms: the subscription school, the select school, and Institute No. 1, 1834–1854
The first school: Mishawaka's schooling begins, on the record the schools themselves keep, in 1834 — a small class taught by a Miss Thatcher in a private home, in the iron-works village's first years.
- 1834–1901The first forms — gristmill, tannery, stores and taverns, the bank, the market house
The first gristmill — here, a flouring mill, and its builder's name is a conflict: Howard's business-enterprises roll states it in one sentence: "During the year 1834, Orlando Hurd opened a hotel for the accommodation of the traveling public; and in the following year Francis P. Taylor erected the first flouring mill."
- 1834–1908The river as transit: the ford, the ferry of 1834, and the subscription bridge of 1837
The first organized crossing service was a ferry: the Indiana Historical Bureau's marker at the southwest corner of Main Street and Mishawaka Avenue records that the first bridge replaced a ferry which had operated here from 1834, and the 1875 illustrated atlas of St. Joseph County carries the same beginning in its…
- 1834–1963The postmasters: the federal government's local face
The office that named the town: The Mishawaka post office was established in the spring of 1834, before the town had the name — and, on Chapman's telling, the office gave the town its name: the Indian name "Mishawaka" was given to the post office "at the suggestion of Mr. Werrington, who was appointed postmaster."
- 1834–1990The two oldest houses: the Ellis-Schindler and Merrifield-Cass houses
The older building: The Ellis-Schindler House at 900 Lincolnway West is a Greek Revival house of 1834 — one-and-a-half stories of wood clapboard on a brick foundation, its heavy raking entablature carried on dentils and regulae, its recessed entry porch framed by paneled pilasters carved with stylized honeysuckle…
- 1834–2011The web as one story: who staffed Mishawaka's schools
The subscription school of 1834 and the town superintendent of 1848 answer to the iron-works village's own ambition; the Catholic classes begin with Father Edward Sorin's Holy Cross missionaries in 1844 — the Religion section owns the mission — and settle into St. Joseph's vestry, then its 1864 brick schoolhouse.
- 1835The other instruments: Barbee, Indiana City, the Fowlers, Taylor
Its title is "Plat of the Town of Mishawaka," made by William Barbee and Henry Harman on 2 April 1835 and acknowledged 20 April 1835 as the "Town Plat of Mishawaka," by the proprietors, "William Barbee and Henry Harman, by William Barbee as Agent."
- 1835The water-power ground: dam, races, and the reserved tract
The town's second title system was written in water: The St. Joseph Iron Works' charter — the act approved 22 January 1835 constituting Hurd, John J. Deming, John H. Orr and their associates "the president, directors and company of the St. Joseph Iron Works, for the purpose of manufacturing iron" (Local Acts 1834, page 79)…
- 1835Four plats on two banks
On April 2, 1835, William Barbee and Henry Harman made their own plat immediately east of the works, and titled it, outright, the "Plat of the Town of Mishawaka" — the first recorded plat on which the name Mishawaka appears, as Howard notes; the settlement it planted was known as Barbee Town.
- 1835Flour first: the eastern market of the mill town
The first thing Mishawaka shipped out was flour: The town's first flouring mill rose in 1835, two years after the plat, and by 1858 flour was the largest single manufacture in the town's economy…
- 1835First United Methodist Church: The First Church Building
A society of eight members was organized on 19 July 1835 — the genealogical timeline also carries a duplicate organization row under 1836, and the 1835 date stands here as the society's own settled date, with the duplicate noted.
- 1835–1899The first servants: five trustees and a clerk of the election
The election of 1835: Mishawaka's public service begins with a return of election.
- 1835–1963The long tail, II: trustees, councilmen, clerks, marshals and the appointed desks — entries 28–58
James White — one of the five trustees elected 31 January 1835 at the house of Orlando Hurd, the first public servants of the place (Howard (1907), the election return).
- 1835–2022A County Court at South Bend, and Mishawaka's Own Officers
On January 1, 1835, the village of St. Joseph Iron Works — the furnace settlement on the river from which the city descends — was organized with trustees White, Deming, Stancliff, De Camp, and Sanderlands; Chapman's county history calls it the first village organization in the county.
- 1835–todayThe frame: trustees, a town board, then a city
The village of 1835: On 31 January 1835 St. Joseph Iron Works became the first incorporated village in St. Joseph County, ahead of South Bend, and its residents elected five village trustees…
- 1835–todayPublic Servants: Open Questions
The named gaps, with their settling sources: (1) The town officers of 1835–1899 between the first trustees and the last town board — the Mishawaka City Council Records, 1845–1977, at the Hesburgh Libraries, and the town minute books they continue.
- 1836Battell Park
The city's first public park began as ground reserved, and withheld, on a speculative plat: When Joseph Battell and Grove and James R. Lawrence platted Indiana City on the north bank in 1836, they reserved the high riverfront tract — the ground Howard's history describes as "reserved for water power"…
- 1836–1979The churches as buildings: a survey of the unlisted sacred fabric
The first generation: The city's first church building was a Methodist society's, raised in the fall of 1836 — a year before the town's plats were united.
- 1836–todayIndiana City's paper geography: the park that was a power reserve, and the squares never built
The boldest lines on any Mishawaka plat were never built on: the Indiana City plat of 1836 reserved its riverfront for industry and its interior for institutions, and the city's present map still carries the reservations — under other uses.
- 1837The water-power town
The dam turned a furnace site into an industrial town: In 1837 the works' proprietors dammed the river at the head of the rapids.
- 1837The crossings
A two-bank town lives or dies by its bridges: The first bridge crossed in the dam's year, 1837 — built by popular subscription for $2,499, west of the dam, joining the furnace town to the north-bank plats while the union act was still a year away.
- 1837St. Paul's Episcopal Church: The Pro-Cathedral Years
The founding: St. Paul's was organized on 20 April 1837 by the Rev. Charles B. Stout — who had come from Edwardsburg, Michigan — and the Rev. Henry F. M. Whitesides, as the diocesan archives spell the second founder's name; the parish's own published history spells it Whitehead, and both spellings stand as the two records give them.
- 1837–1889The race economy, counted in 1889
Ward Baker's study of Mishawaka on the eve of the Civil War, resting on the Hydraulic Company's records and the press of 1837, puts it in one sentence: "Factories occupied the low land along the river bank and the race, while private residences and business houses were along the streets to the south."
- 1837–todayTwo banks, one town: the river-divided halves as lived places
The river was the town's first street and its first wall: until 1837 the two banks were separate settlements joined by a ford and a ferryman.
- 1837–todayStreet names and renamings: the documented equations
Race Street keeps the oldest industrial name in the city: the dam of 1837 stood at its foot, and the races it fed lined both banks.
- 1838One town, one name: the act of 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).
- 1838–1843Removal's course on this ground, 1838–1843
When that disputed treaty's deadline passed on 5 August 1838, Governor David Wallace authorised General John Tipton to remove the band by force; Tipton's militia surrounded the Twin Lakes village at the end of August, the rolls recorded 859 people, and on 4 September 1838 the column set out…
- 1838–1921The second rank — Howard's incorporation roll and the directories' small headings
Howard's roll, the firms no other entry carries: the Mishawaka Iron and Manufacturing Company, organized under an act approved February 17, 1838, capital one hundred thousand dollars — John N. Sherman, Orlando Hurd, George W. R. Fowler, Charles W. Pomery and Alonzo Delano…
- 1839The first brewer and the first distiller: John Wagner, tested
Peter J. De Kever's history of the city, commissioned by Mishawaka itself, traces the Kamm & Schellinger company's origins to "John Wagner, who had operated a brewery and distillery in town since 1839."
- 1839The distillers: one documented still, then a searched silence
The positive, restated at its size: Mishawaka's distilling record opens with the strongest early claim in either city's build: John Wagner operated a distillery in the town from 1839, on the city history's record, beside his brewery — a still running in the iron-works town when South Bend had no maker of any kind.
- 1839Wine and mead: the searched negatives, at true size
Both negatives are printed at their true size, which is this one paragraph: the leg that found a distillery in 1839 and a brewery in a pizza palace reports, for wine and mead and cider, that there is nothing to report, and says how it looked.
1840s
- 1840First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)
The founding: The Christian Church in Mishawaka met first in a schoolhouse in Pleasant Valley, northeast of town, in 1840, on De Kever's account, and moved to another school building on East Second Street before building on West Second Street in 1850.
- 1840–1860Counted before the Powells: the antebellum community in the censuses, 1840–1860
The 1840 census gives St. Joseph County nine Black residents.
- 1841–1845The first paper: the Mishawaka Tocsin, 1841, and the paper that walked away
The first newspaper published in Mishawaka was the Mishawaka Tocsin, established in 1841 by Wilbur F. Storey. So Timothy Edward Howard's 1907 county history states it, with a historian's hedge the record keeps: the Tocsin "seems to have been" the first.
- 1842Two lines before the union: Kamm from Toledo, Schellinger from the mill
The Kamm line: Adolph Kamm was born 13 June 1842 at Zöbingen, in Württemberg, and was brought to America at the age of eight by his parents.
- 1844The French thread: a mission's language, tested as a community
From 1844 the village was served from Notre Dame by the French-born Edward Sorin and his Congregation of Holy Cross priests — the names the parish record keeps are Sorin's, Francis Cointet's, J. Gouesse's…
- 1844St. Joseph Catholic Church: The Mother Parish
Father Edward Sorin's Holy Cross missionaries served the village from 1844, saying Mass in homes; a converted house at 815 Elm Street and a room at the southeast corner of Lawrence and Margaret streets, arranged for divine service from 1848 to 1855, carried the mission, under the name Church of the Holy Angels.
- 1844–1863The abolitionist presence, at counted size
In 1844 the Liberty Party's James G. Birney drew 33 votes in St. Joseph County. In 1845 the abolitionists fielded a full state ticket; in 1846 Whigs, Democrats and Abolitionists all ran full state and county tickets here.
- 1844–1904The iron company's engine and the volunteer companies
The Tiger, 1844: Mishawaka's first fire engine was bought to protect a factory, not a town. In 1844 the St. Joseph Iron Company purchased a hand pump engine, "The Tiger," for its works on the river — the works around which the town itself was then still assembling.
- 1844–1907E. Volney Bingham: justice of the peace, postmaster, state senator
E. Volney Bingham was born 1 August 1844 in Penn township, his father an early settler associated with the St. Joseph Iron Works; he worked in a furniture factory, read toward the law, and at the Civil War's opening put the law aside and enlisted, becoming sergeant major of the Forty-eighth Indiana…
- 1844–1933The people: Beigers, Eberharts, and Saunders
Jacob and Martin Beiger: Jacob Beiger, a native German who came to America in 1844 bringing his family, bought the mill with his son in 1867; his dates were not settled in the record reached, and the gap is named rather than filled.
- 1844–todayThe Irish: the mother parish's first people
The parish that building housed — erected 10 December 1848 as the Church of the Holy Angels, later St. Joseph's — was from its first decade a shared Irish-German congregation, and the Irish are named in its founding geography: from 1844, before any church stood, Mass was said in the homes of Edward Mulligan, George…
- 1846–1848Two short lives: the Bee of 1846 and the Free Democrat of 1848
The Mishawaka Bee was started in 1846 by S. P. Hart and discontinued after two years. Chapman and Howard agree on the founder, the year and the lifespan, and neither records more: no editor after Hart, no politics assigned, no file surviving.
- 1847St. Peter's Lutheran Church: The German Mother Church
The course: St. Peter's is Mishawaka's German Lutheran mother church, established on 24 May 1847. A modest chapel on East Broadway served the early 1850s; a frame church at Church and Front streets was dedicated on 16 November 1862; and from 1872 the congregation carried its origin in its name, St. Peter German Lutheran.
- 1847–1855The price of the rescue: the penalty suits, boundary-printed
The case, in the founding file's own naming: the freedom case of David and Lucy Powell, South Bend, 1847–1850 — expressly no relation to the Mishawaka Powells of the founding file…
- 1847–1855Cholera: the County's Record Is Notre Dame's
What the county record gives is Notre Dame's, and it is boundary-printed as Notre Dame's: in Charles Hope's centennial history of the university, "at various times during eight years, from 1847 to 1855, an exhausting epidemic of malarial fever and cholera so oppressed the faculty and students that the University…
- 1847–1856The traffic, at evidence strength
The reservoir the traffic ran toward was real, and it is Michigan's: across the state line, the Black settlement of Cass County, Michigan, held — on the estimate of an 1851 pamphlet — some 1,200 to 1,500 Black people, many of them fugitives, with Wright Maudlin at its center…
- 1847–1883George Milburn: The Wagon Fortune Mishawaka Made and Toledo Kept
The fortune: George Milburn (born 3 June 1820 at Alston, England; died 1883) came to Mishawaka by way of a Goshen dry-goods counter and a Kosciusko County farm, settling in the town in 1847–49 and entering business as clerk, then junior partner, in A. B. Judson & Co.'s general store at Main and Vistula.
- 1847–1903Martin V. Beiger: The First Millionaire
The fortune: Martin Valentine Beiger (born 3 February 1847 in St. Joseph County; a private of Company H, 138th Indiana Volunteers in 1864) entered business in the river mill his father Jacob had bought in 1867 — the woolen mill at the dam that became Ball Band, whose whole course stands in the Ball Band file.
- 1847–2006The business founders at full People size: Dodge, the Beigers, Eberhart, Mix, Kapson
Martin V. Beiger (1847–1903), the son who made the fortune: Martin Valentine Beiger was born 3 February 1847 in St. Joseph County, a private of Company H, 138th Indiana Volunteers in 1864, and at twenty-one a member of the family firm inside the mill's first Beiger years.
- 1847–todayThe Germans: the founding culture that became the background
The Germans organized first and lasted longest: St. Peter's Lutheran Church, established 24 May 1847, is the German mother church of Mishawaka, and its course is the German community's institutional spine — a frame church at Church and Front streets dedicated 16 November 1862…
- 1848Sent away: Indianapolis, then Logansport, and the Westville traffic
Indiana's first state hospital for the insane, enacted in 1827 and built at Indianapolis in 1848, was for forty years the destination of every county's commitments.
- 1848–todayThe school servants: superintendents, the board's long members, and a secretary of thirty years
The first superintendent the record names is the first the system had: Mr. Butts , who had kept his own school and was employed by the city as superintendent when the five-room brick Institute No. 1 opened in 1848, with Jacob Merrifield, Jefferson Merrifield and Miss Skinner as his assistants…
- 1848–todayThe School City of Mishawaka: superintendents, referenda, the hard years, the present
Mr. Butts, employed as superintendent in 1848, is first. E. L. Hallock held the office at the high school's opening in 1874.
1850s
- 1850The population spine
Every count below was read in the census volumes themselves: Before the federal series opens, the town's growth is carried by local counts and the city history: about 100 people in 1834; 328 in 1835 and 756 in 1838, as the 1921 Polk city directory reports them; some 862 by the end of the 1830s, in De Kever's account…
- 1850The series in full: the city census by census, 1850–2020
The whole table: Before the federal series opens, the town's growth is carried by local counts — about 100 people in 1834, 328 in 1835 and 756 in 1838 as the 1921 Polk city directory reports them, some 862 by the end of the 1830s in the city history's account, and 1,166 in 1840, again the directory's figure, which…
- 1850The eras of growth, read off the numbers
A furnace town, a factory city, and then a staircase: The first era is the water-power town, and its rates are modest because the town was modest: 1,412 people in 1850, 2,640 in 1880…
- 1850–1852The first train: October 4, 1851
West of the line, the building company was the Northern Indiana & Chicago Railroad, chartered 30 November 1850; its track ran from the state line through Elkhart, Osceola and Mishawaka to South Bend, and it opened the whole way on the day the first train reached Mishawaka…
- 1850–1930The labor the works drew
The factories' growth can be read off the census curve, and the curve is this record's steepest: The Population section carries the series from the census volumes, and it is conformed here, not re-derived: 1,412 people in 1850; 2,640 in 1880; 5,560 in 1900; 11,886 in 1910; 28,630 in 1930.
- 1850–1939Rose Hartwick Thorpe — the poet, by birth
Rose Alnora Hartwick was born in Mishawaka on 18 July 1850, the daughter of William Hartwick, a tailor and pioneer settler, and Mary Louisa (Wight) Hartwick.
- 1851–1971The passenger era, and its end line by line
The service began with the road itself in 1851; by the 1890s the town rode in numbers the city's history preserves from the greatest excursion season of the century: for the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893, Mishawakans traveled "by the Lake Shore Railroad, Grand Trunk Railway, or steamer across the…
- 1851–2013The works fires: the anchor plants burn, one by one
Wagner's brewery, 1851: John Wagner had operated a brewery and distillery in Mishawaka since 1839. In 1851 his business burned.
- 1851–2026The disaster set at building granularity: a register
(a) The anchor-plant fire series, as a register: Wagner brewery , Center Street — brewery and distillery building burned, 1851 ; rebuilt on North Center Street, 1853.
- 1851–todayThe sisters as a workforce: thirty-two years of nursing, a hospital, a nursing school, and the motherhouse on Dragoon Trail
The Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ, founded at Dernbach, Germany, in 1851 by Maria Katharina Kasper, sent three sisters to Mishawaka, who arrived on 25 October 1878 and settled at St. Agnes Convent, at Fourth and Spring Streets.
- 1852The county fair comes to Mishawaka, 1852 — at pointer size
The pointer: The oldest gathering in this record is the St. Joseph County fair of 1852, the one year the county's fair stood on Mishawaka ground.
- 1852The Masons: Mishawaka Lodge No. 130, from 1852
The institution: A Masonic lodge was organized in Mishawaka on 26 May 1852, and Howard prints its first officers whole: R. S. Alden, Worshipful Master; D. H. Smith, Senior Warden; J. Holdridge, Junior Warden; J. E. Hollister, treasurer; T. S. Cowles, secretary; A. C. Foot, Senior Deacon; W. M. Wood, Junior Deacon; A. L. Brimsmaid, Tyler.
- 1852Mishawaka Lodge No. 130: the order of 26 May 1852
The institution: Mishawaka's Masonic lodge was organized on 26 May 1852 — the town's second lodge body, a decade behind the Odd Fellows' first — and Howard prints its first officers whole: R. S. Alden, Worshipful Master; D. H. Smith, Senior Warden; J. Holdridge, Junior Warden; J. E. Hollister, treasurer…
- 1852The South Bend Breweries
The pointers: The Muessel brewery of South Bend — Christopher Muessel's house of 1852/53, incorporated 1893, the region's first brewery by its nomination's frame…
- 1852The Fair Mishawaka Hosted: The County Fair of 1852
The St. Joseph County Agricultural Society that held the fair of 1852 was the society's second organization.
- 1852–1865The county register that does not survive
The test, run against the surviving-register record: the 1852 registration act made every Indiana county clerk the keeper of a register of the county's Black residents — the "Negro register" — and the question for this county is whether its volume survives.
- 1853The newspaper with three birthdays
The county histories say 1853: Chapman (1880) and Howard (1907) both begin the Free Press in that year, DeWitt Clinton Ireland founder, sold two years on to L. A. Elliott, who changed the name to the Enterprise.
- 1853The longest-lived house, and the keepers' test
On the ground from 1853 (and in its founder's operation from 1839) to the close of 1951, it outlasted Muessel as a family brewery — South Bend's house passed to Drewry's of Winnipeg in 1936, its family brewing done by about 1922 — and it outlasted the keepers' association itself, which closed in 1950, a year before it.
- 1853–1855Beyond the Congregations: Academies, Schools, and Shared Works
In 1853 Father Sorin bought the Indiana City Hotel and installed a girls' boarding school there, Holy Angels Academy, taught by the Sisters of the Holy Cross.
- 1853–1903The Rotation That Never Came Back: The County Fair After 1852
The 1853 fair stood on the Washington Street acres described above.
- 1853–1951Kamm & Schellinger — the brewery
Wagner's brewery: Mishawaka's brewing course opens with John Wagner, who built the first brewery structures in 1853 — the date the Indiana Historical Bureau's marker gives and the year the National Register nomination carries for the original Brewery Building at 100 Center Street.
- 1853–todayMedia as business — the newspapers and the broadcasters, as firms
The Mishawaka Enterprise, as a firm: the property begins as D. C. Ireland's Free Press — founded 1853 in the county histories, 1855 in the contemporary Register notices, 1854 in the paper's own later directory returns, the conflict printed whole in the newspapers file…
- 1853–today100 Center Street — the brewery address the city keeps in the news
The ground: The Kamm and Schellinger Brewery at 100 Center Street, listed on the National Register on 11 October 1979, is the city's one industrial building of Register standing — the brewery John Wagner built in 1853, bought in 1870 by Adolph Kamm and Clemens Dick, and incorporated in 1883 with Adolph Kamm president.
- 1853–todayThe Kamm and Schellinger Brewery: the 1853 stack and the 100 Center
The brewery building itself is mill construction in Chicago common brick painted red, on a rubble stone foundation, four stories tall, its front topped by an elaborate metal cornice and pediment framing the date 1853, a colonnaded cupola over a twelve-foot roof vent…
- 1853–todayThe architects of Mishawaka buildings
John Wagner, builder-architect of the Kamm brewery buildings of 1853 — a brewer building his own works. Elom Eller, the farmer who built the Eller-Hosford House of 1875–77 — the Register's database credits him where his nomination's form reads "Unknown," and both stand.
- 1854The Bank of Mishawaka — the bank that never opened
Its notes were unknown to collectors until the American Bank Note Company's archive holdings were dispersed; what survives is proof impressions, among them a $2 proof dated 1 August 1854 (Wolka 1620-04 in the Indiana obsolete-currency census).
- 1854The bankers — a paper bank, one charter, and Darwin Wiekamp
A Bank of Mishawaka was organized under Indiana's free-banking law in 1854 and its notes were engraved by the American Bank Note Company — and the bank never opened; it survives as proof notes, and no organizer's name stands in the numismatic record that carries it.
- 1854–1983Banking: One Charter, No Sized Fortune
The town's first bank never opened — the Bank of Mishawaka free bank of 1854 survives only as proof notes.
- 1858The County's First Murder Indictment: Eager and Kelley, 1858
Charles Eager was indicted on October 7, 1858, for the murder of Charles Kelley, at Mishawaka — the place stated in the indictment's own summary as Chapman prints it.
- 1858Mishawaka at the State Fair: The Judging Committees of 1858
The premium list for the Seventh Annual Indiana State Fair, published in the Daily State Sentinel of Indianapolis on 1 April 1858, names the committees appointed to examine each department and award its premiums — and two of those committees carry a Mishawaka name.
- 1858–2005High-Profile Murders as Their Own Treatment — Era by Era
1858–1906, the long quiet opening: The era holds one case, and it stands whole in crime-03: the county's first murder indictment, Eager's, for the 1858 stabbing of Charles Kelley at Mishawaka, ending in acquittal on self-defense.
- 1858–todayThe collections: the city's archive of first resort
The Enterprise : the issue of April 7, 1858 to October 28, 1865; a single issue of May 28, 1870; and then from September 7, 1872 — the week of the Great Fire, two days after it — in a weekly sequence that runs, through duplicate and overlapping reels the list itself discloses, to December 26, 2019, the last reel.
- 1859The wreck of June 27, 1859: the Night Express at Springbrook
The event, soberly, from the record: On the night of 27 June 1859 the eastbound Night Express from Chicago to Toledo, carrying about 150 people on the Michigan Southern & Northern Indiana, was due in Mishawaka at 11:27 p.m.
- 1859–1932The historians, as authors
The town's own first historian wrote in a newspaper: George Merrifield, a pioneer who taught school in Mishawaka off and on for twenty years, published nine articles in 1859 under the title "Mishawaka: Its Early History and Present Condition" — the record's first sustained act of local history-writing, quoted still by every successor.
- 1859–1983The Old-Settlers' Stock: Merrifield's Articles, Brunner's 137 Essays, and the Certificates
George Merrifield, publisher of the town's first paper, published in 1859 — in the Enterprise , under Archibald Beal — a nine-article series, "Mishawaka: Its Early History and Present Condition": the town's first history, written within living memory of the founding by a man who had been part of it, and the seed…
- 1859–2023The newspaper-to-book course, at anchor
It begins before the books did: Merrifield's nine newspaper articles of 1859 were history written for a newspaper's columns, the course De Kever's essays would repeat a century and a half later out of a classroom rather than a newsroom.
1860s
- 1860St. Andrew's United Church of Christ: The German Evangelical Church
The course: St. Andrew's was organized on 14 October 1860 under the Rev. Philip Wagner, a German Evangelical congregation whose records were kept in German until 1919.
- 1861The Soldiers' Aid Society: benevolence in the first week of the war
The town's first named charitable organization was a war society: News of Fort Sumter's fall reached Mishawaka on 15 April 1861, and in the series of public meetings that followed, on the commissioned city history's account, citizens voiced strong loyalty for the Union, a Soldiers Aid Society was organized, and…
- 1861–1865Company I of the Ninth Indiana: the captain from Mishawaka
Twice raised in one year: St. Joseph County put a company into the 9th Indiana Infantry twice in 1861.
- 1861–1865Company F of the Forty-eighth: the company raised at Mishawaka
Another Penn Township man, Isaac H. Gilman, whose post office was Mishawaka, enlisted in 1861 at Goshen under the 48th's colonel, Norman Eddy, served three years and eight months, and fought at Iuka, at Florence, and through the siege of Vicksburg; his biography does not name his company, and he is printed unassigned, at that strength.
- 1861–1865The Civil War dead as the rolls give them
The county's first martyr stands at the Roll's head in South Bend's frame and is not Mishawaka's: John Auten, killed July 10, 1861, whose name South Bend's Grand Army post would take.
- 1861–1865The other regiments: the county's war beyond two companies
15th Indiana — Company B: St. Joseph County was represented by Company B entire, and by one member in Company A. The regiment was organized at Lafayette in May 1861 and mustered June 14, 1861, with George D. Wagner as colonel.
- 1861–1945Women's war work: the Aid Society of 1861, the Red Cross workrooms, and Elizabeth Richardson
The town's first charity was a women's war society: in April 1861, as the Civil War opened, Mishawaka's women organized the Soldiers' Aid Society — in De Kever's account the town's first named charitable organization of any kind.
- 1861–1945The women and the nurses
The Civil War nursing is the county's glory and the motherhouse towns' story: Eighty Sisters of the Holy Cross answered Governor Morton's call of October 1861 under Mother Angela and served as military nurses, becoming the forerunners of the Navy Nurse Corps aboard the Red Rover in 1862…
- 1861–2022St. Joseph's Parish Square: a block held since 1861
The parish — the mother parish of Mishawaka Catholicism, whose congregation's record stands whole in the religion record of this history — was established on the full block in the southwest corner of the commercial district in 1861 and has been based on the square since.
- 1862–1921Water and the alarm: the cistern, the works, the bell, the boxes
The cistern in the street, 1862: A hand engine is only as good as its water, and Mishawaka's first public water for firefighting was a hole in the ground: in 1862 the town placed a 400-barrel cistern in the middle of the intersection of Main Street and Lincolnway, to be drafted from where the business district needed it most.
- 1863The Sisters of St. Francis of Perpetual Adoration: Olpe to Lafayette, 1863-1943
She was born Regina Christine Wilhelmine Bonzel, called Aline, on 17 September 1830, and she built the community out of an orphanage and school work begun in Olpe in the 1850s: the community received approval on 29 September 1859, the first sisters were invested on 20 December 1860, and the congregation itself dates…
- 1863–1864William Gibson: the first rooms, 1863
In 1863 he opened rooms in Mishawaka over H. D. Higgins' Jewelry Store, the Mishawaka Enterprise recording the fact; the Indiana State Gazetteer for 1864–65 places him on Main Street, Mishawaka.
- 1863–1956The shape of the record: two Mishawaka names in the county list
The thinness stated: The fullest harvest of the trade ever made for this county is the South Bend Area Genealogical Society's list "South Bend and Mishawaka Photographers, 1863–1921," whose entries the Indiana Album's Indiana Photographers Project carries as person records built from directories, censuses, newspapers and surviving cards.
- 1864–todayThe parish schools: St. Joseph, St. Monica, St. Bavo — and the one school they became
St. Joseph School, the mother school: The Catholic school web begins in the mother parish's vestry, where St. Joseph's children were taught until 1864, when a brick schoolhouse rose on Spring Street behind the church.
- 1866–todayThe elementary city: Battell, Beiger, Bingham, LaSalle, Emmons, Hums, Liberty, Twin Branch
Battell School , erected 1900 on the north side where Abner Pettit's 1866 frame schoolhouse had stood, took its pupils from the grove school line that reached back to the river's first classrooms; its present building is the one the corporation's 2016 capital inventory dates to 1981.
- 1867Jacob and Martin Beiger, and Adolphus Eberhart — the woolen founding, in three hands
The purchase: In 1867 Jacob Beiger and his son Martin V. Beiger bought the woolen mill at the dam.
- 1867–1886The Beigers and the woolen company
The purchase: In 1867 Jacob Beiger and his son Martin V. Beiger bought the woolen mill. The company's history and every later carrier agree on the year and the buyers; the price and the seller's name are not carried in the record reached.
- 1867–1921The furniture trade, whole — from the wholesale cluster of 1868 to the dealers
The wholesale cluster: Howard's roll gives the trade its corporation first: the Mishawaka Furniture Company, organized October 10, 1867, capital sixty thousand dollars, incorporators Adoniram B. Judson, Robert Montgomery, Lewis T. Booth and De Witt C. Eggleston.
- 1867–1925William J. Oliver: the low bidder on the Panama Canal
The tie, exactly: William Jesse Oliver was born January 13, 1867, in Mishawaka, to Henry and Clara Oliver — a born-here tie; how much of his youth was spent here the record read does not establish, and this entry does not claim it.
- 1868John D. Stearns: one line, 1868
A name and a trade, nothing more reached: The directory sample's 1868 canvass carries a single Mishawaka photographer: John D. Stearns, printed under the trade heading with no address the roster preserves and no second line in any record reached for this fragment.
- 1868–1878Institute No. 1, the Main Street school, and the high school's opening, 1868–1878
The record gives the building two dates, and both stand: the 1924 Miskodeed dates it 1868, at a cost of $50,000, and calls it "the pride of the 1,800 people of Mishawaka"; the high school's own history page dates the first high-school building 1869, on Hill Street between First and Second, holding grades one through twelve.
- 1868–1902The private bankers — Judson A. B. & Son, and Clark & Whitson
The directory record: The Business Directory of St. Joseph County for 1868 prints a Bankers heading for Mishawaka with one house under it: Judson A. B. & Son, at Second and Main.
- 1868–1921The livery trade — three stables, two barns, one survivor, and the motor succession
The course: the 1868 county directory carries Livery Stables with three houses: Badger Henry & Co.; Burt C. E. — the Burt name that returns in the 1889 ice line and the 1868 meat markets — and Wilklow F. Johnson's 1902–03 directory carries two: Myeski J. S., Livery Barns, at 113 W. 2d…
- 1868–1921The Horse Economy's Animal Side: Livery Stables, and the Missing Veterinarian
The beginning is the village's first directory roll, 1868, which carries two livery stables: C. E. Burt's and F. Wilklow's — Wilklow standing in the roster's first-roll narrative among the mill town's founding trades, "F. Wilklow at the livery," alongside the brewers, the cooperage, and the boot-and-shoe man.
- 1868–1931The Powells: the family at the center, 1868–1931
The move across the river made Mishawaka's first Black household of record: Elijah married Mary Ann Hackley of Niles, Michigan, and the couple moved to Mishawaka with their daughter Medora in 1868.
- 1868–1931Black women's organizing: the test, and Medora Powell's documented life
Elijah Powell — born in Owen County, Indiana, in 1841, a sergeant of the 102nd U.S. Colored Regiment recognized for gallantry in South Carolina in 1864–65…
- 1868–1949The printers — the press as a business
The course: the 1868 county directory gives the trade its first Mishawaka form under the heading Printing Office: Brower N. V., opposite the town hall…
- 1868–1949The storefront rolls — the women, the immigrant shops, and the Black business of record
The Black business of record, at anchor size: Mishawaka's first Black business stands whole in the black-history file — Elijah Powell's barbershop, practiced from 1868 for thirty-eight years — and is pointed to here, not retold: this section adds only its frame.
- 1868–1987The City Directories, Year by Year as Actually Used
The series as used: the 1868 Business Directory of St. Joseph County (Genealogy Trails transcription, read whole; sixty-six proprietor lines hand-paired) — whose "Bankers" heading carries Judson A. B. & Son, the entry that corrected the first business pass's pre-charter banking silence…
- 1868–todaySchooling: the common school from 1868, and the fight that is not in this record
The state frame is printed at frame size only — the 1869 permission, and the 1949 act that ended legal school segregation in Indiana — because neither is a Mishawaka event; Mishawaka's own timeline is the family's: 1868 arrival, 1887 graduation, 1908 the second.
- 1869To 1869
A Eberhart & Co — A Eberhart & Co — Flouring Mills (banked 1868; directories: 1868) A Hutsinger — Hutsinger A — Physicians (banked 1868; directories: 1868) A Taylor — A Taylor — Blacksmith (banked 1868; directories: 1868) Alanson M Hurd — St Joseph Iron Works — Iron Works (banked 1833) B Holcomb — Holcomb B…
- 1869The carriage crossover that left town: the Milburn Wagon Company
George A. Milburn had been manufacturing wagons in Mishawaka as early as 1853; the Milburn Wagon Company was incorporated in Mishawaka, Indiana, on 23 August 1869, and built the horse-drawn vehicles — farm wagons above all — that the trade of the day ran on.
- 1869Palmer C. and Pardon J. Perkins — the windmill brothers
On 10 August 1869 he was awarded patent No. 93,472 for an "Improvement in Windmills" — the solid wooden-wheel mill that carried his name — and he turned the axe works over to his nephew Newman Perkins and built the windmill business on the patent.
- 1869–1872Palmer C. Perkins and the windmill: the patent of 10 August 1869
The Patent Office's own list, as Scientific American printed it for the week ending 10 August 1869, carries the grant in one line: "93,472. — WINDMILL. — P. C. Perkins, Mishawaka, Ind." Letters Patent No. 93,472, "Improvement in Windmills," covered the solid wooden-wheel mill that carried his name…
- 1869–1907The South Bend Woolen Company — Mishawaka's men, on South Bend ground
The Monon Society's mill account, carried in South Bend's file, dates the company's operations to 1869 and puts its mill on the east bank of the St. Joseph River between LaSalle and Colfax streets, in South Bend, producing principally woolen fabrics for men's wear — suitings and overcoatings.
- 1869–1910The transmission trade: Mishawaka sells power's means
Nor was Dodge alone in the trade: the 1889 directory carries the Keasey Pulley Company in the same town, a second pulley maker in the place Dodge was making a pulley capital, and the Perkins Wind Mill and Axe Company beside them…
- 1869–1925The Second Tier: Windmills, Axes, and the Fortunes Print Does Not Size
The Perkins brothers: Palmer C. Perkins bought the idle Bement axe factory and turned it to the solid wooden-wheel windmill of his 1869 patent (No. 93,472); his twin brother Pardon Joshua Perkins joined him in 1871, and on 14 July 1873 the brothers and four partners formed a joint-stock company with capital of $4,000…
- 1869–todayThe Water Level Route: the main line along the south bank
The first road became the great through route of the North: On 6 April 1869 the Michigan Southern & Northern Indiana was consolidated into the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railway, and the line through Mishawaka became part of the Water Level Route…
1870s
- 1870Adolph Kamm and Nicholas Schellinger — the brother-in-law brewery
In 1870 the brewery was purchased by Adolph Kamm and Clemens Dick, who came to it from Toledo, Ohio — the firm of Dick and Kamm.
- 1870The union and the company: Dick & Kamm, the partnership of 1879/1880, and an incorporation carried two ways
The purchase: In 1870 John Wagner sold his interest in the brewery to Clemens Dick and Adolph Kamm — De Kever's phrasing, "Wagner sold his interest," keeps the founder in the transaction the company account tells as a purchase…
- 1870–1951The Kamm Money: Beer, a Brother-in-Law's Milling Wealth, and an Island's Name
The brewery on the river — John Wagner's of 1850 — was bought in 1870 by Adolph Kamm (born 13 June 1842 at Zöbingen, Württemberg, brought to America at eight) and Clemens Dick, from Toledo…
- 1870–todayNo Black congregation of its own: the searched record
The one founding that touches this ground is a Powell founding, across the river: in 1870 the Rev. John Bundy and nine charter members, among them Farrow and Rebecca Powell — Elijah's father and mother…
- 1871Town to city: the charter of 1899
The question of a city charter was put and voted down in 1871, and put again and voted down in 1896. In February 1899 it was put a third time, and this time it carried, 702 to 336 — "the third time proved the charm," the Mishawaka Enterprise said.
- 1871–todayThe Grand Trunk on the north side
The sentence's dating does not survive the railroad's own chronology, and the conflict is printed whole: De Kever places the link "in the 1850s," but the Grand Trunk's predecessor in the valley was chartered by Indiana in 1866, its single track was built in 1871, it first operated as the Chicago & Lake Huron, and it…
- 1872The night the town burned: the great fire of 1872
On the night of September 5, 1872 — the fire broke out at 7:45 p.m., in Peter J. De Kever's account in the city's commissioned history — a downtown of wood-frame buildings, hay, and open flames, in hot, dry conditions and a strong wind, burned beyond the means at hand to stop it.
- 1872The fire whose cause no record assigns
The worst night in the town's history begins with a sentence that declines to explain it: On the evening of 5 September 1872, fire broke out in Mishawaka and destroyed nearly ninety percent of the business district, the town hall with it — the town's hand engine stored inside the hall, so that the fire consumed the means of fighting it.
- 1872–1886The fires that built the department: 1872, 1881, 1886
The night of 5 September 1872: The fire that remade Mishawaka broke out at 7:45 p.m. on 5 September 1872, in Peter De Kever's account in the city's own history — a night of hot, dry conditions and a strong wind, in a downtown of wood-frame buildings, hay, and open flames, served by inadequate firefighting equipment.
- 1872–1920Edward A. Jernegan: the editor of forty-eight years, 1872–1920
In 1872 Edward A. Jernegan purchased the Enterprise, and the paper's wandering proprietorship ended for half a century.
- 1872–1921The club movement: the Ladies' Library, the lodge auxiliaries of 1907, and the Woman's Club of 1911
After the fire of 1872, a ladies' subscription library — a dollar a year — circulated its books from borrowed rooms; in its later years the collection rested in a church annex, and at the end, in the telling the library's own history preserves, in the restrooms of the Mishawaka Woolen & Rubber Company.
- 1872–1969The library that moved by book cart
The wanderings: Mishawaka's library began, on the surviving record, with a fire: the earliest-known collection, the Maclure library, was destroyed by fire in 1872, the year of the town's Great Fire.
- 1872–2005The demolition ledger
The Great Fire, 5 September 1872: The ledger opens with the town's first erasure: the fire of 1872 took some ninety per cent of the business district, the town hall and the fire engine stored against just such a night, the First Presbyterian Church's 1846 building, and the Maclure library's collection…
- 1873The First Stocking: Shad in the River, 1873
The Michigan State Board of Fish Commissioners' work is summarized in the Michigan DNR's own research report on exotic fish introductions: Jerome (1875) listed the stocking of 210,000 American shad fry in June 1873 in the Grand, Detroit, Flint, Raisin, and St. Joseph rivers…
- 1873–2002The Phoenix Bar & Grill: the room in the building the fire raised
On the night of 5 September 1872 the city's great fire began in a barn on West Second Street and destroyed 49 buildings and 82 businesses at a loss put at $140,000 — the fire's full record is the Fire & Safety section's…
- 1874–2025The count of the transformation: a ladder, not a series
The Ball Band works: twenty-five persons at the incorporated company's start in 1874 (the company history); 140 to 150 about 1893 (Goodspeed's memoirs); nearly 2,000 in 1903 (the Beiger Mansion account)…
- 1875Mishawaha as Littlejohn Wrote Her: The Tale in Its First Telling
Flavius Josephus Littlejohn — Michigan lawyer, legislator and judge, a surveyor and geologist in the southwestern Michigan wilderness in his early years — published the collection at Allegan, Michigan, in 1875, under the full title Legends of Michigan and the Old North West…
- 1875–1932Lincoln Park — the famous grave that never held anyone
The Story of Mishawaka section record of this history tested the legend against the documents and printed the verdict: the princess's tale is a work of fiction, first told by Flavius J. Littlejohn in his Legends of Michigan and the Old North West of 1875…
- 1875–1932The Tale in Its Three Forms: The Book, the Bronze, and the City's Own Summary
The record beside the variants: the documentary spine beneath all three forms is one line long, and it is the Story of Mishawaka section's: a work of fiction, published in 1875, is the first and only early source for every element of every form.
- 1875–1983The Eller-Hosford House: the Italianate survivor
Elom Eller, a farmer, built it in 1875–1877 and mortgaged the property to do it. The nomination's builder line reads "Unknown"; the Register's database credits Eller himself as the house's architect-builder — both statements stand in the formal record, and both are printed here.
- 1875–2025Mishawaka in other people's fiction
The most consequential fiction ever set on this ground is the one the city is named for in its own imagination: Flavius J. Littlejohn's 1875 story collection, in which a Michigan judge and author invented "Mishawaha," the Shawnee princess whose legend the Story of Mishawaka section of this record tests and prints whole.
- 1878The Poor Handmaids' charity: nursing the poor before the hospital, and after it
It begins as pure charity: three sisters at St. Agnes Convent from 25 October 1878, ministering to the sick in their homes and taking the worst cases into the convent to recover — home nursing of a factory town's sick, much of it necessarily unremunerated, for thirty-two years before the hospital of 1910 gave the work a building.
- 1878The nursing sisters: St. Agnes Convent, 1878
Those are the province's courses, told in the Fort Wayne record; Mishawaka's begins on 25 October 1878, when three sisters came to St. Joseph's parish and took up residence at St. Agnes Convent, near the southeast corner of Fourth and Spring Streets.
- 1878Dodge Manufacturing — the power-transmission house
The jack inventor: Wallace Harlow Dodge (1849–1894) was a Mishawaka man — Discover Indiana, the Indiana Historical Society's place-history program, calls him Mishawaka-born — who patented his Magic Jack, a wagon jack of his own invention, and in 1878 founded the Dodge Manufacturing Company in Mishawaka to make it.
- 1878The Magic Jack: Williams and Dodge, and the patent of 15 October 1878
Letters Patent No. 208,940, "Improvement in Wagon-Jacks," was applied for on 3 April 1878 and granted on 15 October 1878 — and its face reads "Miles D. Williams and Wallace H. Dodge, of Mishawaka, Ind." The received telling, from the Indiana Historical Bureau's marker line of descent through Discover Indiana's…
- 1878–1894The Dodge Money: A Fortune Documented as a Company, Not an Estate
The fortune: Wallace Harlow Dodge, Mishawaka-born, founded the Dodge Manufacturing Company in 1878 on his 1878 Magic Jack patent — the wagon jack whose Split Pulley patent of 1882 made the firm, by 1910, the city's largest employer at more than 1,200 persons (the Businesses file owns the company's whole course…
- 1878–todayThe industrial buildings at survey size
The works' founder has his own marker in the city besides: the Wallace H. Dodge marker on Union Street north of East Seventh, where Dodge founded his company in 1878, moved to the site in 1880, and patented the wood split pulley in 1882.
- 1879–1926The daily tests: a Christmas bazaar paper, the Daily Journal, and the daily that never took
The first attempt is the strangest survival in the library's list: the Daily Bazar, of which the film holds December 28, 1879 to January 2, 1880, and December 20 to 24, 1880…
- 1879–todayBattell Park's built fabric: the monument, the bandshell, the rock garden
The district: The Battell Park Historic District, listed 11 January 1996, counts two contributing buildings, one contributing site, two contributing structures and one contributing object in its eleven documented acres…