City Hall, Mishawaka, and the mayor on the card

Mishawaka, Ind. The card was made in 1910, and its captions do two jobs at once: “City Hall, Mishawaka, Ind.” and, under a portrait set into the sky, “Mayor Herzog.” The building was only six years old. The city had put it up in 1904 at First and Church Streets.

Mishawaka was a young city, too. Its voters had turned the town into a city in 1899 and chosen Manuel Fisher as the first mayor. By the census of 1910 the city held 11,886 people, more than twice as many as in 1900. A new high school and St. Joseph Hospital both opened that year.

A postcard that puts a mayor’s face over his city hall is a small piece of civic boasting, and Mishawaka had a good deal to boast about. In a single decade it had doubled in size, swallowed its outskirts, lit its streets with electricity, built a hotel and filled its river bank with factories. This is the story of the building on the card, the man in the sky above it, and what became of them both.

From iron town to city

DocumentedMishawaka began as an iron town. Bog iron was found along the St. Joseph River at the start of the 1830s; in 1833 Alanson Hurd bought the 640 acres that make up central Mishawaka and platted a village called St. Joseph Iron Works, and in 1834 its furnace began making pig iron. In 1835 St. Joseph Iron Works became the first incorporated village in St. Joseph County, and in 1838 the Indiana legislature joined it with neighboring settlements into a single town named Mishawaka.

DocumentedThe town had its disasters. In September 1872 a fire destroyed three-quarters of the business district, and in 1874 the Milburn Wagon Company left for Toledo. But in 1878 Wallace Dodge opened a sawmill and factory that grew into the Dodge Manufacturing Company, and the Mishawaka Woolen Company, incorporated in 1874, grew into the rubber and woolen works later known as Ball-Band. In 1880 the town counted 2,640 people; by 1900, 5,560.

DocumentedIn 1899 Mishawaka’s voters decided to change their government from a town to a city, and elected Manuel Fisher the first mayor. A city needs offices, a council room and a lock-up, and five years later, in 1904, a new City Hall went up at First and Church Streets. In 1905 the city annexed 1,353 acres, the “Great Annexation,” which pushed its limits out over the new neighborhoods growing around its plants.

The city on the card

DocumentedThe card shows the building as a three-story brick hall with a gabled tower over an arched doorway. The copy in the Library of Congress carries the title “City Hall, Mishawaka, Ind., Mayor Herzog” and is dated 1910.

DocumentedThe few years around the card were the busiest in the city’s early history. In 1908 Vice President Charles Fairbanks came to Mishawaka for a campaign rally and parade before the general election. In 1909 the city held a Historical Pageant and Fourth of July celebration with a great parade, the dedication of the new Hotel Mishawaka, and the switching-on of the city’s new electric street lights. The city’s main source of power was the Hen Island dam in the Twin Branch neighborhood, which had begun producing electricity in 1903.

DocumentedThen came 1910. The census found 11,886 people. The city’s timeline records that a new Mishawaka High School opened at North Hill and West Second Streets and that St. Joseph Hospital opened at South Spring and West Fourth. The state historical marker at today’s high school dates the new building of those years to 1911, one block south of the old school at First and Hill. In 1911 the First Presbyterian Church opened its new building, and the city’s Simplex Motor Car Company entered two cars in the first Indianapolis 500.

ReadingSo the card was made in the middle of a boom, and it was made for a city that wanted to look modern. Its city hall was new, its mayor was new, its high school and hospital were new, and its population had just doubled. A real-photo postcard with the mayor’s face pasted into the sky caught that mood exactly.

The mayor

DocumentedHe was John A. Herzog, a Democrat, elected in November 1909; the papers printed his name in their lists of the new mayors across Indiana. Herzog was also State Chief Ranger of the Catholic Order of Foresters, and in July 1911 an Indiana paper introduced him as “State Chief Ranger John A. Herzog, mayor of Mishawaka.” The Foresters chose him again in June 1913.

DocumentedThe Decatur Daily Democrat carried the 1909 list on its front page on 3 November, the day after the vote, with Herzog among the mayors chosen in Indiana’s cities. The Walkerton Independent of 20 June 1913 put his re-election by the Foresters under the headline “Heads Foresters,” calling him “Mayor John A. Herzog” and naming him State Chief Ranger of the order.

DocumentedThere is more on Herzog in print than we have yet been able to read. Timothy Edward Howard’s A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, published in 1907, two years before the election, lists in its index a sketch of “Herzog, John A.” on page 760, next to one of an August Herzog on page 759.

ReadingIs Howard’s John A. We have not yet seen those two pages of Howard, and we have not found an obituary.

The Foresters

DocumentedHerzog’s other title tells us something about his town. The Catholic Order of Foresters was a fraternal insurance society for Catholic men, founded in Chicago on 24 May 1883 on the model of an older order in Boston. Its local branches were called courts. A member paid assessments, and when he died the order paid his family; at the start a flat one-dollar assessment per death raised the money. In April 1909 the order counted 1,600 courts and 136,212 members in twenty-six states and Canada, with its headquarters in Chicago.

ReadingTo be State Chief Ranger was to head the order’s courts across Indiana, and to be chosen twice, in 1911 and 1913, speaks to Herzog’s standing among the Catholic working men of a factory state. In a city of factory workers, a man known across the state as the Foresters’ leader was also a name that voters would recognize on a ballot.

DocumentedThe order met in Indiana in July 1911, and the Rensselaer Evening Republican reported the gathering under the headline “Indiana Foresters Meet,” introducing the mayor of Mishawaka by his Forester title before his civic one.

Factories and the people they drew

DocumentedThe city Herzog governed lived by its plants. Dodge Manufacturing, which had begun as Wallace Dodge’s sawmill, made its name in 1884 with the Dodge Independence Wood Split Pulley, built rope-drive power transmission from 1886, and in 1893 furnished the power for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. By 1902 its works covered nearly 65 acres with 40 buildings. The Mishawaka Woolen and Rubber Company, later known as Ball-Band, made rubber goods. And from 1906 to 1915 the town built the luxury American Simplex motor car.

DocumentedAll this industry filled the city. Between the census of 1900 and that of 1910 the population rose from 5,560 to 11,886; by 1920 it was 15,195, and by 1930, 28,630.

ReadingDoubling in ten years is not easy on a city government. New streets, sewers, police and fire protection, school buildings and street lights all came due at once, and the 1904 City Hall, built when the city was barely half the size it would be in 1910, was the place where those bills were argued over. Herzog’s term fell squarely in the middle of that growth.

After Herzog

DocumentedThat autumn an earlier mayor, Melville W. Mix, ran again, and the South Bend News-Times said Mix would take up the work “continued along the same lines by Mayor Herzog.” In the election of November 1913 Mix lost by 423 votes to Ralph W. Gaylor, who ran as an independent.

ReadingThe News-Times sentence implies that Herzog had carried on lines of work begun by Mix in an earlier term, and that Mix ran in 1913 as the man to keep them going. Herzog himself was not on the ballot.

DocumentedThe city kept growing under Herzog’s successors. In 1916 the Mishawaka Public Library opened its new building at North Hill and First Streets, built with $30,000 from Andrew Carnegie and listed today on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1925 the Tivoli Theater opened on North Main Street with seats for 1,400, and the coal-fired Twin Branch power plant began operating beside the dam. In 1963 Margaret Prickett defeated the sitting mayor, Joseph Canfield, to become Mishawaka’s first woman mayor.

Where did it go?

ReadingThe South Bend Tribune wrote in 2022 that an older city hall on Church Street had stood where the police station is now, and that the city moved its offices to the old Bingham school in 1984. Today City Hall is at 100 Lincolnway West.

DocumentedTwo more pieces of the record narrow the question. The Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library’s history of its Heritage Room says that in 1974 the Mishawaka Police Department “moved from City Hall” to the empty 1914 post office at 120 South Church Street, and that in 1995 the police moved again, to a new station at Church and First Street. The city’s own timeline dates the move of City Hall “from First Street to the former Bingham School on East Third Street” to 1986.

ReadingPut those together and the answer is very probably yes. The 1904 City Hall stood at First and Church; the Tribune’s Church Street city hall stood where the police station was later built; and that police station, opened in 1995, stood at Church and First. All three descriptions point at the same corner. If so, the building on the card served the city for some eighty years, gave up its police department in 1974, was emptied when the offices moved to the Bingham school in the mid-1980s, and was gone by the time the new police station opened in 1995.

DocumentedThe sources disagree on the year of the move to the Bingham school: 1984 in the Tribune’s 2022 story, 1986 in the city’s timeline. The Tribune adds that the city bought the school, tore down its original building of 1898, and put its offices in the school’s 1967 addition at 600 East Third Street, a space City Clerk Debbie Ladyga-Block said was “nearly filled” from the day they moved in.

DocumentedOn 3 October 2022 City Hall opened at 100 Lincolnway West, in the former Liberty Mutual Insurance call center of the late 1980s, which the city had bought in 2019. The police followed later that month. That same week the Common Council voted to sell the 1995 police station, which backs onto the St. Joseph River a few blocks east, for $500,000, to become a company headquarters and a wine bar.

ReadingA photograph of the 1904 building’s demolition, or a newspaper notice of it, would close the case.

A timeline

• 1835 St. Joseph Iron Works becomes the county’s first incorporated village
• 64 years later
• 1899 Mishawaka votes to become a city; Manuel Fisher first mayor
• 1904 New City Hall built at First and Church Streets
• 1905 The “Great Annexation” of 1,353 acres
• 1909 Hotel Mishawaka dedicated and electric street lights switched on at the July pageant; John A. Herzog elected mayor, November
• 1910 Census counts 11,886; the City Hall card is made
• 1911 Herzog introduced as State Chief Ranger at the Indiana Foresters’ meeting, July
• 1913 Foresters re-elect Herzog, June; Ralph W. Gaylor elected mayor, November
• 61 years later
• 1974 Police move out of City Hall to the old post office
• 1984–86 City offices move to the former Bingham School
• 1995 New police station opens at Church and First
• 27 years later
• 2022 City Hall opens at 100 Lincolnway West, 3 October

If you go

DocumentedMishawaka’s City Hall is open to the public at 100 Lincolnway West. The corner of First and Church Streets, where the 1904 building stood, is a few blocks to the east. The old Carnegie library at 122 North Hill Street, built in 1916, still stands a few blocks away.