The armories as a succession: Sample Street, Kemble Avenue, Rose Street

To 1963; 1963; 2025–26 · South Bend's armory line, in order

The county seat's armories can now be put in order, with the middle move dated by the city's own ordinance — and the succession is printed with its remaining holes named. First in the reached record: a State Armory standing on a site the Sample Street Bridge project needed, in the years before 1963 — the bridge's construction forced the armory's removal, and the Naval and Marine Corps Training Center beside it faced the same displacement. Second: by Ordinance No. 4561, passed 11 March 1963, the City of South Bend donated a new armory site to the State of Indiana — a Kemble Avenue tract in Section 14, Township 37 North, Range 2 East, running some 900 feet south from Bruce Street along Kemble toward Donald Street and west toward Webster Street — for the erection of an armory, with a joint facility with the Naval District contemplated in the same instrument. The Kemble Avenue armory is the wars file's named county armory, and the ordinance is its dated origin. Third: the Rose Street property — 2402 East Rose Street, the South Bend Armory, also carrying the name of the Captain Lyle J. Thompson U.S. Army Reserve Center — which stood vacant for almost four years before a renovation begun in late 2025, contractor's work running toward March 2026, prepared it as the temporary home of an Indiana Army National Guard engineer company of some 130 soldiers. The wars file also names a Mishawaka recruiting station; recruiting is a storefront function, not an armory, and it prints as the succession's footnote. Residue, named: the construction dates of the Kemble Avenue and Rose Street buildings themselves, and the pre-1963 armory's own dates and address, stand in the Indiana National Guard's armory history, the audit's settler, current. On Union Township ground the succession's local line is unchanged and total: no armory ever stood there. This item closes mixed on the residue named.