The singing-society test, printed at its result

1879–2026

Tested negative on this ground; the county's chorus tradition is real, and it is South Bend's. The test was run in Howard's (1907) societies material, in the records of Salem — the one congregation on this ground where an ethnic chorus tradition could plausibly have lived, a German-speaking Evangelical church — and in the Tribune archive's open doors: no singing society, Sängerbund, glee club, or ethnic chorus seated in Clay or Harris township appears in any source reached. The contrast that proves the test was worth running stands twenty minutes away. South Bend's immigrant societies are catalogued by name in the St. Joseph County genealogical record: a German Turnverein, a German Progress Club, and — the county's first Polish choral group — the St. Cecilia Society of St. Hedwig Church, founded in 1879 for church purposes, fostering patriotic and folk song under Casimir Luzny, remembered as South Bend's first Polish composer, and singing in concert with the South Bend Orchestra at the Auditorium in 1913. Granger's farm century had Germans in numbers — Salem's congregation is the proof — but they were farm families of a township, not townsmen of a city, and they left a church, a cemetery, and no chorus. The only chorus this ground has ever seated is the one Arts already carries: Discovery Middle School's school chorus, an institution of 1996, not of the ethnic century.

From the St. Joseph County immigrant-societies register (South Bend Area Genealogical Society / INGenWeb, Jim Piechorowski's submissions, 2005) for the St. Cecilia Society and the Turnverein; Howard (1907) and the Salem record in Religion for the negative on this ground.