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1929–c. 1960 · Harris Township, north of State Road 23, west of Fir Road
Before Bendix Field, the county's air terminal stood in Harris Township, on ground now inside the Granger CDP's orbit. The site — north of State Road 23, west of Fir Road, at approximately 41.741, −86.168 — is fixed by Paul Freeman's Abandoned & Little-Known Airfields survey of northern Indiana (airfieldsfreeman.com), which reconstructs the field pass by pass from charts and aerial photographs. Its earliest depiction is a Department of Commerce Airway Bulletin dated January 16, 1929: a municipal airport owned and operated by the City of South Bend, a 240-acre square sandy turf field with a 3,200-foot east–west dimension. The 1930 sectional chart shows it as a commercial/municipal field. A WSBT-TV piece of February 6, 2012 ("Granger Neighborhood Was Original South Bend Regional Airport," by Kelly Stopczynski) corroborates the siting on Granger ground.
The field's federal course is fixed by the National Weather Service's own station history (weather.gov, Indianapolis–area office history for South Bend): aviation weather observations began December 1, 1929, at South Bend Municipal Airport, six miles northeast of the old Post Office — this field — and the observation site moved February 28, 1933, to the new Bendix Field, three and a half miles northwest, where a Weather Bureau Airport Station was established October 11, 1937. The move of the weather station is the dated hinge on which the county's air traffic swung from Harris Township to German Township.
The South Bend Tribune of April 1, 1973, looking back, still called the old field — "four hangars, fairly good runways" — "the principal air terminal for South Bend" in its day. Its second life came with the war. The Tribune of August 9, 1942, announced: "Today will mark the official opening of Cadet field, formerly known as the old St. Joseph county airport, located six miles northeast of the city near the Edwardsburg road" — renamed for its new purpose, pilot training, work for which it had already been used. (The Indiana Transportation History record itself flags the period confusion between the two fields — which one a given 1940s reference means is not always clear in the sources, and that confusion is printed rather than resolved.)
The great training prize went elsewhere, and the negative is documented: in March 1942 a huge naval air training base was proposed near South Bend, to use the South Bend airport temporarily; the base was one of thirty awarded that year, and it went to Peru, Indiana, not here. At Bendix Field, the war years ran on civilian shoulders: South Bend lobbied for an Army Air Corps base and lost it to Fort Wayne (the Tribune's "Airfax" column, October 27, 1940), while the Civil Aeronautics Administration relied on private operators at the field for the civilian pilot training program "destined to play a large part in the national defense scheme." Homer Stockert, who had established Stockert Flying Service at Bendix Field in 1933, served as a P-47 test pilot at Evansville during the war and returned to expand the service (Hartwig, Bendix Field, 2014).
Cadet Field's fade is chart-dated: the August 1944 sectional still shows a commercial/municipal field; a 1952 aerial shows three unpaved runways and eight hangars; the last chart depiction is the 1957 sectional, showing a 2,500-foot unpaved runway; a 1960 aerial shows the field presumably closed, hangars standing, no aircraft; by 1980 the ground had reverted to farmland; and in the 1998 and 2021 aerials, houses and streets cover the site with no trace of the field. One caution is printed at full strength: the open sources identify this Harris Township field firmly as the original South Bend Airport and Cadet Field, but whether it is the specific field remembered in the Harris Township trustee's letter carried in the Story of Granger section (GAP-SPINE-8) is not confirmed first-hand from Germaine Goff's The History of Harris Township (1980). It is the strongest candidate in the record; the identity test itself remains open, and its settling source stands named in the Story of Granger section.