The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
OCTOBER 1852 · AT BOUNDARY SIZE — MISHAWAKA'S WHOLE
The rotation that defines the early fair touched Penn Township exactly once. In the fall of 1852 the county fair was held at Mishawaka — then the township's river town, its west end — "the people of the town paying all the expenses," with an address by the Hon. John B. Niles of La Porte. The fair never came back: for 1853 the society leased two acres on Washington Street in South Bend, bought them, and the fair's seats stayed in the county seat and, later, between the cities. For Osceola the 1852 fair is a boundary fact, printed at this size: it stood on Penn Township ground a year after the railroad first ran through the townsite (October 4, 1851), when Osceola was a station and a vacated plat, not yet a town — the fair belonged to the township's older settlement, and its whole telling belongs to Mishawaka.
Principal sources: Chapman (1880), ch. XIII, in Howard (1907), vol. 1, ch. VII §1 (one witness, as printed above); this build's spine (railroad opening, October 4, 1851).