The disaster set at building granularity: a register

1851–2026 · BUILDING BY BUILDING

The narrative of the anchor plants' fires stands in the Major Events addendum (this history, "The works fires"), and the town fires of 1872 and 1886 stand in this history at town size. What this article carries is the register form of the disaster set — plant, building, year — with the landmark-house fire, the hall-fire test, and the current-year fire at the same building size.

(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.
• Dodge Manufacturing, Union Street — factory building destroyed by fire, 1881; rebuilt at once and enlarged.
• Kamm & Schellinger brewery, Center Street — a fatal explosion, year not carried by any source reached; brewery building swept by fire, 1950; the brewery closed 1951 and the building survives in the 100 Center conversion.
• Dodge/Reliance/RMG foundry, 500 Union Street at West Ninth — the steel shop building, in storage use, burned the night of February 11, 2013 and was nearly levelled; not rebuilt.
• Ball Band works, North Hill Street — no building fire at register size stands in the record reached; the works' fire load was routine and small (27 fires, about $6,128 in damage, in the house organ's c. 1948 accounting), and the plant's end was demolition, not fire: imploded June 17, 2000, as the banked Ball Band article records.

(b) The landmark-house fire: The Beiger Mansion — Martin Beiger's house, completed 1908 at a cost of $100,000 — stands in this history's wealth record with its fire dated January 20, 1975, and its restoration after. A widely copied summary dates the house's gutting by arson to 1974. Both dates are printed, as the two records give them; the mansion was restored, sold furnished in 1989 for $350,000, and stands today as an inn and event venue.

(c) The hall fire with the man not found — the test, printed: The record was searched for a Mishawaka hall fire in which a man was not found — in the city's commissioned history, in the banked fire record, and in the press record reachable on the open web, under the hall, lodge and fraternal forms of the story. Nothing stands. The only halls in the city's fire record are the Odd Fellows and Masonic halls burned in the great fire of September 5, 1872 — and of that fire the record is explicit that there was no loss of life. No Mishawaka hall fire with a missing or unfound man appears in any source reached, and the absence is printed as the finding. The settler, if the story exists anywhere, is the Mishawaka Enterprise and South Bend Tribune morgue record, with the Mishawaka Fire Department's run records, where a hall fire with an unaccounted occupant would be a dated file.

(d) The current-year fire, 2026: On April 21, 2026, fire took a warehouse in the 900 block of East McKinley Avenue, near Filbert Road, behind the Blue Lantern restaurant. WNDU's report of that evening names the building as the warehouse of The Source Company, a floor-covering distributor, and carries the company's account that the building had been hit by lightning just after 5 p.m. — a cause firefighters did not confirm, with two radar-indicated strikes nearby; the smoke raised an alert on the Notre Dame campus. The South Bend Tribune's report of the same fire has an employee of AAA Mattress and Furniture, at 926 East McKinley, noticing the fire about 6 p.m., Battalion Chief Josh Courtney's account of thousands of lithium batteries exploding in the building, and South Bend and Clay fire crews assisting Mishawaka's — and the Tribune published a correction that its earlier version had given the fire's address wrong, which is why the building is registered here by its block and both of the press's namings, not by a single street number. The Fire Department's own release record for the year adds a second building-size entry: on August 1, 2026, a structure fire at an environmental cleanup and industrial processing facility in the 500 block of Marion Street, fought with South Bend mutual aid, all occupants accounted for and no injuries, the cause under investigation.

Sources:

1. The Major Events depth addendum — the works-fire narratives this register indexes, with their sources.
2. The Wealth section of this history — the Beiger Mansion, its 1908 completion and $100,000 cost, the fire of January 20, 1975 and restoration, the 1989 sale; against the popular summary tradition (carried in the Mishawaka, Indiana encyclopedia entry) dating an arson gutting to 1974.
3. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — the 1872 fire's toll of buildings, the Odd Fellows and Masonic halls among them, and "no loss of life."
4. WNDU, April 21, 2026, and South Bend Tribune, April 21, 2026 (with its published correction) — the East McKinley Avenue warehouse fire.
5. City of Mishawaka Fire Department, media release, August 1, 2026 — the Marion Street structure fire.