Mishawaka, Indiana · 19th century
1850s
36 dated events in 1850s, in order. Part of the full timeline.
19th century 36 dated mentions
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.