Mishawaka, Indiana · 19th century
1840s
23 dated events in 1840s, in order. Part of the full timeline.
19th century 23 dated mentions
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.