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1904–1907 · BOUNDARY: COUNTY FOUNDINGS AT FULL SIZE; ANY FOUNDING ON THIS GROUND, TESTED NEGATIVE
An order founded in South Bend, at an address: on 20 November 1904, in the law offices of Talbot and Talbot in South Bend, John W. Talbot founded the Order of Owls with Joseph E. Talbot, George D. Beroth, J. Lott Losey, John J. Johnson, John D. Burke, William Weaver and Frank Dunbar. The order's local bodies are nests; its government is the Home Nest — the Supreme Nest — at South Bend, and Howard's census, three years on, already prints it as a going concern "recently established at South Bend and chiefly the work of John W. Talbot," its supreme officers named with Talbot as supreme president and a Ladies' Nest No. 1 beside the men's. The order claimed more than 300,000 members by 1911. Its record prints whole, including its bars and its fall: membership was open to white males only, on the standard encyclopedia's statement (Schmidt, Encyclopedia of Fraternal Organizations); and Talbot was convicted under the Mann Act in 1921, sentenced to five years at Leavenworth and a 5,000-dollar fine, after which the national order largely collapsed. The second home office stands in the same census: the Knights and Ladies of Columbia, whose supreme government Howard lists as seated at South Bend in 1907 — Supreme Counsellor Ormond Kennedy, Supreme Scribe John Roth, Supreme Cashier Elmer Crockett, Supreme Medical Director Cornelius H. Myers, Supreme Attorney Daniel Rich — with South Bend Council No. 1 and Winona Council No. 39 beneath them. A supreme government seated in the city is a home office in fact, and the leg prints it as such; the order's founding date and place were not found in any open source reached, and that sub-item closes as a named gap, its settler the order's own records and the Indiana insurance department's fraternal filings. Tested for this ground: no order was founded in Clay or Harris township — the county's two foundings are city foundings, and the only club founding documented on this ground in the whole build remains the Garden Club's, a club and not an order, in the roster below.
From the Order of Owls' own history as carried in the standard fraternal encyclopedias (the 20 November 1904 founding, the eight founders, the nests and the Home Nest, the 1911 claim, the 1921 conviction); Schmidt, Encyclopedia of Fraternal Organizations (the white-males-only bar); Howard (1907), pp. 462–463 (the Owls "recently established," the supreme officers; the Knights and Ladies of Columbia's supreme officers and councils). The Knights and Ladies' founding: a named gap, settler named in the text.