The census of 1907: Howard counts the county's clubs — and seats none of them here

1907 · HOWARD, A HISTORY OF ST. JOSEPH COUNTY, VOL. 1, PP. 456–463 · THE LEG'S FRAME

The dated census, from the named source: Timothy Edward Howard's A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907) closes its first volume's account of the county's institutions with a societies chapter that is, in effect, a club census taken in a single year — and because it is a census it can be counted from. The learned and civic bodies come first: the Medical Society of Northern Indiana (1839) and the St. Joseph County Medical Society, organised 2 July 1855 and meeting in the Odd Fellows' hall; the Bar Association (1873, reorganised 1900); the Commercial-Athletic Club, organised in 1895 as the South Bend Athletic Association, renamed in June 1896, its club house on Colfax Avenue dedicated 1 October 1896; the Humane Society (20 August 1896); the Associated Charities; the literary clubs — the Woman's Literary Club (April 1889), the Progress Club (May 1895), the Impromptu, Mothers', Thursday and Wednesday clubs, the Round Table (organised in the winter of 1906–07, its first meeting in March 1907, its membership limited to sixty gentlemen), the Douglas Debating Club and the Worth Literary Club. Then the fraternal census proper, told lodge by lodge in the next article. The social clubs Howard names as principal are the Choral Club, the Country Club of the St. Joseph Valley, the Concord Club, the Indiana Club, the La Salle Club, the Per Se Club, the Sunnyside Golf Club, the Bismarck Club and the Press Club; the chapter counts six building and loan associations and seven military organisations, the Grand Army of the Republic posts among them. That is the county's membership world in 1907, counted at its named year from its named source: dozens of bodies, professional, literary, athletic, charitable, fraternal and social. Against that count, the census's evidence for this ground is stated plainly, because this section's honesty depends on it: Howard seats no lodge, nest, tent, council, club or society in Clay or Harris township. The only membership body his history ties to this ground is the Grange — the farm order whose commemoration named the ground's post office and town, carried at pp. 310–311 of the same volume, with the county's St. Joseph Valley Grange No. 584 and Pomona Grange No. 31 at p. 271 — and the farms leg has already banked the verdict that no subordinate grange of either township, and no grange hall, stands in the record.

From Timothy Edward Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (Lewis Publishing Co., 1907), vol. 1, the societies chapter at pp. 456–463 (Parts 72–73 of the LDS transcription, read first-hand), with the naming and Grange passages at pp. 271 and 310–311. The township absence is the chapter's own, checked against its full enumeration.