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1920s · transcontinental airway, Cleveland–Chicago leg
The airmail record for this ground is a documented negative at its core, and it is printed as one. The pilot directions preserved by the Airmail Pioneers for the Cleveland-to-Chicago leg of the transcontinental airway route the mail past the county, not through it: Goshen, Indiana, is noted as "three miles north of course," and South Bend, Indiana, is noted as "Seven miles north of course" — that is, the lighted airway ran roughly seven miles south of South Bend, and South Bend was not a stop on the transcontinental mail route. The airway itself was the federally lighted system funded by Congress in 1923: the first night airmail flights flew July 1, 1924, and the 2,665-mile New York–San Francisco lighted airway stood complete by June 1925. The Indiana beacons on the New York–Chicago segment stood in La Porte County (beacon 5, C-NY) and in Elkhart County near Goshen (beacons 10/11, C-NY) — beacon ground in the counties either side of St. Joseph County, not in it.
The contract era tells the same story at one remove. National Air Transport held CAM-3 (Chicago–Dallas, from May 12, 1926) and CAM-17 (Chicago–New York via Cleveland and Pittsburgh), on which the first regular night mail flying in the United States began September 1, 1927. Searches of the open record for a South Bend contract-airmail stop, a first-carrier airmail date at either county field, or a South Bend airmail cachet record returned nothing: no South Bend-specific CAM stop or inaugural airmail date is documented in the open sources reached. What is documented is the scheduled-carrier record of the regulated era (art-53-6). The airmail age, for this county, is the age of an airway seven miles south and fields the mail planes passed over.