The Grand Army: seven posts in the county, one in Clay Township, none on the farm ground

1879 – 1936

The county roster, whole: the Grand Army of the Republic's Department of Indiana, as indexed by the Indiana Archives and Records Administration from the department's own files, put seven posts into St. Joseph County: Auten Post No. 8, South Bend (1879–1936 and beyond), the county's senior post, named for the first martyr of Chapman's chapter; Deacon Post No. 115, New Carlisle (1882–1919); Houghton Post No. 128, Mishawaka (1883–1936), named for the captain of the 9th killed at Shiloh; Albion A. Williams Post No. 197, North Liberty (1883–1913); Jesse Coppock Post No. 378, Walkerton (1884–1923); Notre Dame Post No. 569, at Notre Dame (1897?–1916 — the opening year uncertain in the department's own index, printed as it stands); and Norman Eddy Post No. 579, South Bend (1897–1930). The roster is printed whole because its shape is the finding: a post in every town of the county, and none in the farm townships — except one.

The township's one post: Notre Dame Post No. 569 stood in Clay Township, at the university — in the township, and outside the present census-designated place, whose Clay strip is the township's eastern edge. It was a post of the university community, raised a generation after Auten by a campus of students and employees in a county where the university was itself a Civil War institution (its chaplains and its nursing sisters stand in the county's record). The farm ground of Harris Township and of Clay's eastern sections raised no post of its own in the department's records: the veterans of the Irvin party and the battery buried their dead and kept their Decoration Days through the city posts — Auten's in South Bend and Houghton's across the Penn Township line in Mishawaka — which is a statement about where the posts stood, the only statement the record supports; no post roll reached names the townships' members.

Sources:

1. Indiana Archives and Records Administration, Department of Indiana, G.A.R., post records index — the seven county posts with their numbers and years, as carried in the South Bend build's Veterans leg.
2. Howard (1907) and Chapman (1880) — Auten, Houghton and Eddy, the posts' namesakes.