The militia years: the county's standing companies, named from organization forward

1801 – 1895

The county's militia begins as Indiana's does: the Indiana National Guard's own history traces the institution to 1801, when the Indiana Territory organized militia companies to defend the settlements, and the forefathers of the 151st Infantry fought under General William Henry Harrison at Tippecanoe in 1811. For St. Joseph County the standing-company record, read in Chapman's 1880 county history and the state compilations built on Adjutant General W. H. H. Terrell's reports, runs in the volunteer form the nineteenth century actually used. When the Toledo boundary dispute warmed in 1834–35, Chapman records that military organization had actually commenced in Indiana and a war was expected; the county's part was muster and drill under the general militia law, and no company name for Clay or Harris township survives in either county history's war chapters. The names the record does carry are the county's Civil War organizations, raised at South Bend and mustered from the county's townships together: the 73rd Indiana Infantry, organized at South Bend; the 87th Indiana Infantry, organized at South Bend and mustered in on 31 August 1862 under Colonel Kline G. Shryock; and the 99th Indiana, organized at South Bend with three companies assigned from Indianapolis — the Adjutant General-derived station lists of August 1864 carry all three as South Bend organizations. After the war the independent-company system produced the county's two named standing companies: the South Bend Light Infantry and the South Bend Veterans, both listed in the Guard's own history among the independent militias that reorganized in May and June 1882 into the Indiana Legion regiments — the Legion renamed the Indiana National Guard on 5 March 1895. That is the whole named succession the open record supports: territorial militia, the 1862 South Bend regiments, the 1882 South Bend companies, the Guard. Named gap: a company raised in Clay or Harris township under a township name, if one ever stood, settles only in the Indiana Adjutant General's manuscript militia returns at the Indiana State Archives; neither Chapman's nor Howard's war chapters, read for the militia organization as the audit directed, name one.

From Chapman's History of St. Joseph County (1880), war chapters; the Indiana History Bulletin's Adjutant General (Terrell) county-derivation compilations; Dyer's Compendium for the 87th Indiana; and the Indiana National Guard's published history of the independent companies and the 1882 Legion reorganization. Searches shown: Chapman and Howard war chapters for a township-named company — none named.