The Mishawaka interurban station: Fourth and Main, and the fire-station waiting room

TO 1934 · THE PASSENGER TERMINAL AND THE LINCOLNWAY WAITING STATION

The terminal: Mishawaka's interurban station stood downtown, near the southeast corner of East Fourth and South Main Streets. No photograph or plan of it in service was reached; the building enters the dated record at the moment of its reuse, in the city's own history. After brothers Herman and Andrew Muldoon sold the Muldoon Ice Cream Company on South Main Street in 1936, they started another ice cream factory the next year in the former interurban train building near the southeast corner of East Fourth and South Main. The Muldoons used the old freight depot in the rear of the building to manufacture their product, and when the Bonnie Doon restaurant opened soon after in the former passenger terminal at the front of the building, it was the area's first drive-in with car-hop service. The station's form is therefore documented in its parts — a passenger terminal fronting the street, a freight depot behind it, the two together serving the Goshen Line's Mishawaka stop for thirty-five years — and its afterlife as the first Bonnie Doon is the reason its location survives in the record at all. Bonnie Doon's whole course, from the contest that named it to the surviving Lincolnway West restaurant, is carried in the Food section.

The waiting room in the fire station: The interurban's second documented Mishawaka waiting place stands at the line's east end of town. Mishawaka Fire Station No. 4, at 2319 Lincolnway East, was built in 1929 — De Kever places it at the southeast corner of Brook and Lincolnway East, where it stood until the Capital Avenue railroad underpass let the city close it in 2013 — and its National Register nomination records that the entry had added importance because of the use of the entry foyer as a waiting station for an interurban line on Lincolnway: the line, in the nomination's words, stretched between Elkhart and South Bend through the city on Lincolnway, and the suburban building along Lincolnway East in those years was interurban development. A fire station whose front room doubled as the neighborhood's interurban stop is the fullest surviving evidence of how the line was woven into the east side's daily round.

Sources:

1. Peter De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — the Muldoons' 1937 ice cream factory in the former interurban train building near the southeast corner of East Fourth and South Main Streets; the freight depot in the rear; the Bonnie Doon restaurant in the former passenger terminal, the area's first drive-in with car-hop service; Fire Station No. 4 built 1929 at Brook and Lincolnway East and closed after the Capital Avenue underpass.
2. National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places nomination, Mishawaka Fire Station No. 4, 2319 Lincolnway East — the entry foyer's use as a waiting station for an interurban line on Lincolnway; the line between Elkhart and South Bend through the city.