The county's number: 71

THE PLATE RECORD · 1950–2008 AND AFTER

For two generations, every license plate issued to a car on Harris Prairie announced its county before its number: St. Joseph County's number in Indiana's county-prefix system is 71 — seventy-first in the alphabetical assignment that runs from Adams County at 1 to Whitley at 92 — and the Bureau's own published list of county numbers prints it so: "71 — St. Joseph." The number is the one piece of the Bureau's record that was physically seated in Granger for decades at a time, riding on every bumper in every driveway of the place.

The course runs in three systems. County designations first appeared on Indiana plates with the 1950 issue, as two-letter codes: the plate-history record gives St. Joseph County's codes as BB through BH, while the ShopLicensePlates county key prints BB–BK and BN for the same county and years. The conflict is printed whole, unharmonized; surviving plates and the Bureau's issuance records settle it, and the gap is named below. In 1963 the familiar system began — the two-digit county number as the serial's prefix, the form "most Hoosiers are familiar with," which ran, in the plate references' words, "to the present" in spirit long after the serial itself changed. Within that system the letter following the county number identified the issuing branch: in the 1999–2003 series, the plate references give the example directly — "71 stands for St Joseph and E for South Bend" — so a plate reading 71E was a county-seat issuance, the counter Granger's residents used most. St. Joseph's volume outgrew the single-letter plan in time: the county stands among those that moved to a two-letter serial format, 71AB123, seen on the 2000 base. The issuing-branch letters for Mishawaka and Walkerton are not given in the references reached and are named gaps.

The documented size of the county's plate record, at the strength the references support, is a pair of allocation ceilings computed by the plate-history record from the formats themselves: 69,993 plates issuable under the 1950 letter scheme, 239,976 under the 1963 number scheme. These are ceilings, not registrations — the number of St. Joseph County cars actually registered in any year of the system stands in the Secretary of State's and the Bureau's annual reports, which are named as the settling source for the county's first registrations, in Granger's case the registrations of a farm township whose motorization the Census-era record does not separate out. What the ceilings do prove is scale: the state allotted this county the plate capacity of one of Indiana's largest counties, and the counters that issued them stood in South Bend and Mishawaka.

The prefix's long run ended in 2008. The new white-on-blue issue of that year dropped the county number from the serial; the county's identity moved to a decal reading "71 – St. Joseph" at the top of the plate, later screened at the lower right corner, where the number rides still. The overflow numbers above 92 — extra prefixes for Marion and Lake counties — were retired the same year. And since 2012 the plates themselves have not come from the branch at all: they are made to order and mailed from Indianapolis, with no plate inventory kept at local counters. The county number survives, but as a label, not a ledger — the last physical trace, on Granger's own ground, of the system this section records.

Sources:

1. Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles, "Indiana County Numbers and County Names" (the Bureau's published list, in.gov) — 71, St. Joseph.
2. "Indiana License Plates, Revisited," the Indiana plate-history record (intransporthistory.home.blog, March 16, 2020) — the 1950 two-letter codes (St. Joseph: BB–BH), the 1963 number system, and the allocation ceilings of 69,993 and 239,976.
3. ShopLicensePlates, Indiana License Plate County Codes — county designations from 1950; St. Joseph printed BB–BK, BN (conflict with the plate-history record, printed whole).
4. LicensePlateMania, Indiana — the 1999–2003 series: the first numerals denote the county, the letter the district; "71 stands for St Joseph and E for South Bend."
5. The 15q.net Indiana plate record, as archived — the two-letter overflow format in county 71 on the 2000 base; Wikipedia, "List of counties in Indiana" and the Indiana county-coding record — the 2008 decal change and the retirement of the overflow numbers.
6. LicensePlates.cc, Indiana — plates made to order and mailed from Indianapolis after 2012; no inventory at local offices.