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1850s–2026
Tested negative on this ground, at full search strength. Indiana's band century is documented whole by the state's own preservation office: from the 1850s, small brass and cornet bands formed in hundreds of Indiana communities, fed after 1874 by C. G. Conn's instrument works at Elkhart, and communities with bands built them bandstands — the Indiana Historic Sites and Structures Inventory holds surveyed examples from Michigan City to Fort Wayne and Monticello. Against that state record, the test was run for this ground in the township histories and the Granger Gazette's history columns as republished by Harris Township, in the South Bend Tribune archive's open doors, and in the township and county park records: no street band, cornet band, or township band is named for Clay or Harris township in any source reached, and no bandstand or bandshell has ever stood in either township. The ground had no park to put one in until Harris Township made its first park in 2016, on Elm Road between the library and the fire station — basketball and pickleball courts, a ball diamond, a playground, and a path connection, per the Gazette's own account of the opening; no music structure is in its inventory. The county's bandshell line states the contrast plainly: South Bend itself has concerted in Howard Park for generations without a built shell, and its Howard Park bandshell — $3 million in READI money, design funded in 2026, construction projected April to December 2027 — is a building of the future, not of the band era. The music room this ground's farm century actually built for itself is the one Arts already names: the district schoolhouse, with the churches beside it. Verdict: the sound before institutions left no band and no shell on this ground; the settler for any late find is named — Germaine Goff's History of Harris Township (1980) read first-hand, and the Tribune's township columns on film at the St. Joseph County Public Library.
From the Indiana Division of Historic Preservation & Archaeology's bandstand survey essay; the Granger Gazette (September 2018) on Harris Township Park, via harristwp.com; the South Bend Tribune and WNDU, 2026, on the Howard Park bandshell.