The story
Welcome to Mishawaka
Mishawaka began in 1833 as St. Joseph Iron Works, a furnace town built over the bog-iron swamps beside the rapids of the St. Joseph. The first dam and the first bridge across the river were built here, and the water power of the rapids made it a city of mills and factories.
The first and principal of the towns that became Mishawaka was St. Joseph Iron Works, laid out by Alanson M. Hurd on the south bank and acknowledged on July 15, 1833. Hurd had bought the school-section land, Chapman (1880) says, on the promise of building a blast furnace, and his company meant to smelt the bog iron ore found in the swamp under the hills south of town. The furnace was finished in 1834. The legislature incorporated the iron company on January 22, 1835, and let it dam the river “at the head of the Mishawaka rapids”; the dam, built that year, was the first across the St. Joseph. The Mishawaka bridge company built the first bridge over the river in 1837.
Other plats crowded in beside it. William Barbee and Henry Harman laid out a “Town of Mishawaka” on the east side in April 1835, Francis P. Taylor an addition on the west in 1836, and on the north bank Joseph Battell and James and Grove Lawrence platted Indiana City in 1836, with a “College Green” and a “Court House Square” that never got a college or a courthouse. An act of February 17, 1838, Howard (1907) writes, joined them all under the name Mishawaka; Chapman gives 1839. Meanwhile the village of St. Joseph Iron Works had elected five trustees in January 1835, the first town incorporation in the county, a few months ahead of South Bend.
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The name came first through the post office, established in the spring of 1834 at the suggestion of the first postmaster, Mr. Yerrington. Both county histories say it was the name of an Indian village that once stood on the site. Chapman translates it as “swift water” or “thickwoods rapids,” and Howard as “big rapids”; modern place-name scholars read it differently, and Michael McCafferty connects it with “firewood-tree land.” The story of a Shawnee princess named Mishawaka comes from a book of tales published in 1875, which never says the town was named for her; it was attached to the town only between 1907 and 1909.
The iron ore ran out, Chapman says in 1850 and Howard in 1856, and the iron company turned to making plows and cultivators, becoming the St. Joseph Manufacturing Company in 1868. In 1872 a fire destroyed 32 buildings in the business district, and soon afterward the Milburn Wagon Works moved to Toledo, but new factories filled the old buildings. The Dodge Manufacturing Company, established in 1878, made school furniture and woodenware at first, and the Mishawaka Woolen Company grew into the rubber works later called Ball-Band and Uniroyal, which closed in 1997. Howard also called Mishawaka the peppermint capital of Indiana, for the mint fields on the drained marsh south of town.
On February 20, 1899, the voters chose a city government, 702 to 336, and in May they elected Manuel M. Fisher the first mayor. The town had 1,486 people in 1860 and 5,560 in 1900. AM General began building the Hummer at its Mishawaka plant in 1990. Today the city reaches across the river and north toward the state line, with Battell Park’s terraced rock garden on the north bank and the old power race beside the first dam. The 2020 census counted 51,063 people.
