War production: the test, run whole, and what it found

ITEM 3 · TESTED NEGATIVE · 1941–1945

No war-production technology was built on this ground in the Second World War, and the test that establishes it is printed whole: the candidate the checklist names is St. Joseph's Farm, the Congregation of Holy Cross's roughly 1,300-acre farm on Cleveland Road — this ground's largest enterprise of the era, whose produce moved inside the congregation's economy to Notre Dame's tables (banked, businesses leg). Searched for this item: the University of Notre Dame Archives' farm record (the Archives' farms survey, resting on Thomas Schlereth's "The Notre Dame Farms, 1843–1940" and the South Bend Tribune of March 18, 1995 — the farm active until 1995, its output "everything for the University from peat for fireplaces to tobacco for faculty cigars"); Brother Aidan's Extracts' farm passages; and the Archives' Saint Joseph's Farm Collection finding aid (ArchivesSpace, collection SCF, 1879–1990s, two linear inches, including Brother Carl Tiedt's booklet The Peat Bog: St. Joseph's Farm). No passage reached in any of them records a war contract, a government purchase program, a war-production product, or a wartime conversion of the farm's output; the farm's documented wartime-era course is the course it always ran — food and fuel for the institution that owned it — and wartime food production for one's own university, however real, is not the war-production technology record the checklist item tests. The county's genuine war-production story (the Bendix pattern) is South Bend's and Mishawaka's, printed in their builds; the wars leg's banked verdict for this ground — never a post, fort or camp here — stands, and this item adds the industrial half of the same verdict. The settling source that could overturn it is named: the Saint Joseph's Farm Collection itself, read whole, and the Tribune's wartime file — neither reached at first hand in this run, and the negative prints at the strength of the searches actually run, no stronger.

Sources:

1. University of Notre Dame Archives, farms survey (sites.nd.edu/ndarchives) — Schlereth's farm history; St. Joseph's Farm bought 1867, 1,300 acres near Granger; active until 1995 (Tribune, March 18, 1995); "peat for fireplaces to tobacco for faculty cigars."
2. Brother Aidan's Extracts 238 (archives.nd.edu) — the farm passages searched.
3. Hesburgh Libraries ArchivesSpace — Saint Joseph's Farm Collection (SCF), 1879–1990s, 2 linear inches; The Peat Bog: St. Joseph's Farm by Brother Carl Tiedt, CSC.
4. Banked the Businesses and register's wars-leg summary (rows/leg84.md) — the farm's institutional economy; "never a post, fort or camp on this ground."