Trail Namesakes: What the Modern Map Remembers

The names that honor the trail record on Mishawaka's modern map are few enough to list whole, and the list is the article. First and largest: Dragoon Trail itself, the street on the city's south side, carrying the Dearborn trace's road-era name past the motherhouse at 1515 West Dragoon Trail and east toward Osceola — the one true trail namesake in the city, held at corridors' strength for the street and at this section's for the trail under it. Second: the Riverwalk's official name, the River St. Joseph of the Miamis Trail, in which the city deliberately named its newest trail for the river's Miami-era designation — a namesake not of a trail but of the peoples whose trails the system, at its river reach, most nearly succeeds; the name is the city's own act of memory, and it is documented as one. Third, by contrast: the two garden names that bookend the loop, Kate's Garden at the west for Catherine "Kate" Kosanovich and Marvin's Garden at the east for Marvin Wood, honor persons and stand in the parks file; they are trail furniture, not trail namesakes, and print here in one line to keep the categories clean. Fourth, at the corridors file's strength: Lincolnway carries the Lincoln Highway's name, and the Highway was itself one of the named auto trails of the 1910s — the automobile age's version of the same device, a named route laid over older roads — so the city's main street is a trail namesake once removed, of a trail made for cars. Beyond these, the record reached holds no trail-named street, subdivision, or park in Mishawaka: no Portage Avenue for a carry that happened at the other end of the county, no Trace or Trail street besides the one the Dearborn road left. The negative is bounded to the record reached, and it sharpens the positive: this city's memory of its trails is carried by exactly one street name and one act of river-naming, and both stand where the trails themselves ran — the south side, and the river.