The small houses, carried at their record size

1833–1860s · MISHAWAKA (PENN TOWNSHIP'S OWN CITY)

Between the grand houses — and before them — the ground's travellers were kept by small houses, and they are carried here at exactly the size their record gives them. William L. Earl's Mishawaka tavern of 1833 (art-69-1) is the smallest house of record: a tavern stand run by an iron-works partner, known to history because its keeper's daughter remembered the meteor shower and the swindle story, not because the house advertised. A generation later the town's working hotel was the Milburn House, on the southeast corner of Main and Second streets in Mishawaka: Ward Baker's "Mishawaka on the Eve of Conflict" (Indiana Magazine of History) places it in the business section of the late 1850s as "a local hotel popular with travelers and used by the local people for parties and meetings" — the Republicans' jollification after Lincoln's election ended with a grand supper at the Milburn House in November 1860, and when the war's casualties came home to the county, most of the victims were taken to the Milburn House, with private homes turned into temporary hospitals around it. That is the whole of the Milburn House's printed record — corner, custom, supper, hospital — and it is printed whole, neither inflated into a grand house nor skipped for being small. Osceola's share of the small-houses article is the standing negative: no tavern-grade or two-room house of the town appears in the county histories, the licence record reached, or the gazetteer censuses — the town's drinking and eating record is carried in the banked food fragment without a lodging line. The settler for any smaller house than these is named rather than the house invented: the county commissioners' tavern-licence records and the full Polk entry's residue, both already registered as settlers in the record.

Sources: Baker, "Mishawaka on the Eve of Conflict," Indiana Magazine of History (scholarworks.iu.edu); Howard (1907) for Earl's tavern; banked businesses and food fragments for the Osceola negative and its settlers.