The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1917 – 1918
The county's roll: Indiana's Gold Star Honor Roll — the Historical Commission's volume of the state's dead — carries St. Mishawaka's share of the 109 is twelve; South Bend's is the great body of the roll. The entries give each man's birth, family, occupation, enlistment and death — and they give his place as a town.
The sweep, and its honest result: the county's entries were swept for this ground — for a residence or birth at Granger, for Harris township, for Clay township — and the sweep is empty. No Gold Star entry names either township or the village. That does not prove the townships buried no one in 1917–18; it proves the roll cannot show it, because a Harris Prairie farmer's son who enlisted at South Bend stands in the book as a South Bend clerk or a South Bend farmer. The one name the county veterans index ties to this ground's edge is a burial, not a death: Edward F. Elick, a First World War soldier attributed "Penn–Granger" — Penn Township soil with a Granger mailing address, across the CDP's southern line — buried in St. Joseph Valley Memorial Park. He is printed as the boundary case he is: of the valley's record, not of this section's townships.
The home front, at machinery strength: the war's money machinery ran by township. The county's Liberty Loan canvasses assigned quotas township by township — the South Bend News-Times of 6 October 1918 prints the Fourth Liberty Loan quota for Mishawaka and Penn Township together at $800,000, found and figured in the Mishawaka pass — and Harris and Clay carried their own quotas in the same canvass, as every township in the county did. Their figures are not printed anywhere, and they are not estimated; the settling source is the same October 1918 canvass coverage in the News-Times and the Tribune, on Hoosier State Chronicles.
Sources:
- Indiana World War Gold Star Honor Roll (Indiana Historical Commission) — the St.
- South Bend News-Times, 6 October 1918 (Hoosier State Chronicles) — the township-quota canvass, as read in the Mishawaka pass.
- The St. Joseph County veterans index — Elick's attribution and burial.