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1927 – present
What it is: In Fort Wayne and South Bend the largest pool of private charitable wealth seated in the city today is a community foundation. Mishawaka's equivalent is smaller and older-fashioned: the pooled remnant of a single fortune, held by a single-purpose corporation. Susie Beiger's maintenance trust — $210,000 in the mansion account's figures, $200,000 in the Tribune's — passed its income first to the Beiger Home for the Elderly (1930–1967) and then to the Beiger Heritage Corporation, the Mishawaka not-for-profit preservation body that holds the mansion's interest, holds the protective easements on the Old Carnegie Library, and in 1989 sold the furnished mansion itself for $350,000 while the trust litigation of 2006 showed the arrangement still contested eighty years after the will. The county's community foundation, the Community Foundation of St. Joseph County, is seated in South Bend and is sized whole in South Bend's wealth file; Mishawaka fortunes give through it as county residents, and it is boundary-printed here rather than re-sized. Within Mishawaka's own limits, the Beiger trust and its corporation are the documented pooled afterlife — a fortune that became, by a widow's drafting, a small permanent institution.
Sources:
- The Beiger Mansion, published history, and the South Bend Tribune (2006) — the trust's two figure-pairs, the Home's course, the 1989 sale, and the 2006 suit, all as carried in the Beiger descent entry above.
- Libraries file of this build — the Beiger Heritage Corporation's ownership history and protective easements on the Old Mishawaka Carnegie Library.
- South Bend wealth file of the South Bend build — the Community Foundation of St. Joseph County's published scale, boundary-printed here.