The other candidates, tested: a railroad, a priest, and the order itself

1844–1917 · THE NAME INVESTIGATION, SECOND PART

A railroad naming — tested, and left where the dates leave it. Railroads named hundreds of Indiana stations, for officials, for landowners, for places back east, and a station-first naming is the standing alternative to Howard's commemoration. What the record fixes: the name's earliest dated carrier on this ground is the post office, in operation from 1875 on the postal historian's compilation. The second railroad's arrival is dated — 1882, by the City of Niles's marker. The Grand Trunk's own construction date through Harris Township is NOT fixed in the record reached: the township's account dates its railroad era "about 1870," and the question stands open in this build's spine file as GAP-SPINE-2, with Grand Trunk timetables and official guides as its settlers. So the ordering cannot be closed from the record reached: if the Grand Trunk came about 1870, a station could in principle have preceded the office; if it came later, it could not. What can be said is that no timetable, guide, or railroad record reached names a namer, an official, or an occasion for this station's name — the roads adopted "Granger" in every document that survives, they never explain it — and that by 1884–85 the junction's name was simply the place's, in Polk's commercial record. Verdict: NOT PROVEN either way; the mail, not the rail, is the earliest dated carrier of the name.

A person named Granger — the one real candidate, and the separation that holds. There was a Granger on this ground's story, and he was not a settler, a landowner, or a railroad man: the Reverend Alexis Granger, C.S.C. (born at Daon, France, 19 June 1817; died 1893), who came to Notre Dame in 1844, was the university's first vice-president, and succeeded Father Sorin as provincial of the Congregation of Holy Cross in America in 1868 — one of the two or three most consequential churchmen of the county's first half-century, whose papers the University of Notre Dame Archives holds under his name. Howard's church chapters name him again and again beside Sorin among the priests who carried the county's missions (his index sends the reader to pages 419 and 691), and the township's own tradition — Germaine Goff's township history, as the Harris Township trustee's newsletter carries it — remembers Father Sorin and "a Father Granger" holding Mass for the township's farm families in the brick stage-stop house on Adams Road in the mid-1800s, on this ground, a generation before the post office. He is, by a distance, the most prominent bearer of the name in the county's record, and he was alive, and seated four miles away, when the post office was named in 1875. The candidate therefore stands at full documentary size — and the connection does not exist. No record reached — not Howard, who tells the priest's story in the church chapters and the town's naming in the towns chapter and never joins them; not the township tradition, which keeps the Masses and the name in separate sentences; not any postal or railroad document — states or hints that the place was named for him. The build's standing instruction (assembly flag AF-GR-1) is that the priest and the naming tradition must never be merged, and this section keeps them separate in print: the man is documented on the ground; the naming-for-him is not documented anywhere. Verdict: the candidate exists; the connection is UNPROVEN, and prints as exactly that.

No settler candidate survives the roll. This build's People file, swept from Chapman, Howard, and the 1875 atlas directory, carries no Granger-surnamed householder on this ground at any date; its Fosters are A. J. Foster of section 19, the county superintendent of schools, and Elmira Foster — Thomas J. Foster, the founder of Howard's sentence, appears in NO other record this build reached, and his plat, if it was recorded, sleeps in the county plat books (the gaps roll below). The first postmaster the record reached actually names is Franklin E. Lowry — Polk's, in 1884–85 — a son of the Harris Prairie Lowrys whom the People file carries whole: born on the Harris farm 8 December 1849, a teacher and a Michigan school principal before he came home to Granger's trade and offices. The name was not his to give; he inherited it with the office, nine years in.

The order itself, at its county strength — because the commemoration's plausibility is a fact too. Howard's own volume carries the Grange's local weight at page 271, in his chapter on the county's societies: "St. Joseph Valley Grange, No. 584, has been most successful from the beginning, and its members have been among the most influential in the order. In the person of Aaron Jones, the local organization has frequently furnished the master for the Indiana State Grange; and for several years Mr. Jones was the most efficient master of the National Grange" — with the county's Pomona Grange, No. 31, officered in the same paragraph. The 1893 Pictorial and Biographical Memoirs adds a Clay Township thread: Thomas B. Chalfant, of the Clay Township farm that adjoined South Bend, stands there as "a member of the county Grange, and for a long time was its treasurer." And the federal gazetteer keeps one grange-named place in this county — Tamarack Grange, in the southern tier on the Wyatt quadrangle, where a South Bend paper of 6 May 1917 names "Tamarack Grange, No. 2212" — a numbered subordinate with a place named for its hall, seated in the county's south. Against all of it stands this build's Farms file, unshaken: no subordinate grange OF Clay or Harris township, no hall, no charter list, stands in Chapman, Howard, the atlas, or the order's published record as reached; the one Harris Township Grange member the record names, Albert O. Row, joined an order whose local seats were elsewhere. The commemoration Howard asserts would therefore have been exactly what he describes — an act of the county's movement, performed at a plat in the movement's heartland township — not the naming of a town for its own hall, there being no hall. The story is coherent. Coherence is not documentation, and the verdict of the lead article stands: UNPROVEN, with its settler records named.

Sources:

1. University of Notre Dame Archives, ArchivesSpace: the Alexis Granger Papers (GRA; creation 1817–1892, bulk 1842–1892) and the agent record "Granger, Alexis, 1817-1893" — pastor of Sacred Heart, provincial of the Indiana Province from 1868; Joseph A. Lyons, Silver Jubilee of the University of Notre Dame (1869), pp. 80–82, as carried in Pat McNamara's biographical sketch: born Daon, France, 19 June 1817; arrived Notre Dame 1844; first vice-president of the university.
2. Howard (1907), vol. 1: the index entries for Alexis Granger (pp. 419, 691); p. 271, Sec. 5, "The Grange, Farmers' Institutes, etc.," quoted — St. Joseph Valley Grange No. 584, Aaron Jones, Pomona Grange No. 31 and its officers — read at page strength for this section.
3. Pictorial and Biographical Memoirs of Elkhart and St. Joseph Counties, Indiana (1893), the Thomas B. Chalfant sketch, as transcribed in the LDS Genealogy text of the volume: the county Grange membership and treasurership; the Richmond Quaker kin.
4. Polk's Indiana State Gazetteer, 1884–85 (as above): Franklin E. Lowry, postmaster. This build's People file: the Lowry line whole (James of Leeds; Franklin E., born 8 December 1849) and the settler roll's Fosters — pointed to.
5. U.S. Geological Survey gazetteer data as carried in the TopoQuest Wyatt quadrangle listing: Tamarack Grange, populated place, 41.59616° N, 86.13778° W; South Bend News-Times, 6 May 1917, p. 7 (Hoosier State Chronicles digitized run, OCR as read): "Tamarack Grange, No. 2212."
6. This build's Farms file (the Grange-locals test and its verdict) and Spine file (GAP-SPINE-2, the Grand Trunk construction date; AF-GR-1, the standing separation of the priest from the naming tradition) — pointed to, not re-dug.