16 August 1956 — the Toll Road opens, and its first half ends at Roseland

AARoads Wiki, Indiana Toll Road (dated citations); Indiana Toll Road Commission, 1954 report; Whiting-Robertsdale Historical Society

For one season in 1956, the Indiana Toll Road ended at Roseland. Construction of the road had begun 21 September 1954, and its first construction section ran through St. Joseph and LaPorte counties — Rieth-Riley Construction of South Bend and Goshen building 7.4 miles through the county's west. The road opened in stages, east to west: "The first half, from the Ohio line to US 31 outside of Roseland, north of South Bend, opened on August 16, followed by an extension to LaPorte on September 5. The formal dedication ceremony was held on September 17, 1956, a day after the highway was opened to US 20 in Gary. The highway was completed on November 15." The dedication ceremony itself was held in South Bend. The "US 31" of the 1956 terminus is the old highway through Roseland — today's SR 933, Dixie Way — not the modern US 31 freeway, whose Roseland-area interchange (Exit 72) dates to 1980. From that August, the town stood at the meeting of the state's great east–west toll road and its north–south highway: the interchange at the town's northern end — originally Exit 6, later Exit 8, and since the 1981 mileage-based renumbering Exit 77, signed for SR 933 and Notre Dame — is the physical form of the town's modern identity. (The exit's numbering and rebuilding course, including its 1995 conversion from a trumpet to a signalised junction, belongs to the movement pass and prints there.) What the event did not do is also in the record: no carrier reached states that the town grew because of the exit, and the decennial series shows the town shrinking through the Toll Road decades — 984 in 1950, 971 in 1960, 895 in 1970, 832 in 1980 — a terminus and an exit, not a boom.