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1907 – 1914
The county's smallpox stands in a federal return: the United States Public Health Reports' table of cases reported to 6 December 1907 prints, under Indiana, "St. Joseph County — South Bend… June 16–July 20… 6" — six cases in the county's city across five weeks of the summer of 1907, the deaths column recording none. The State Board of Health's December 1914 bulletin counts 386 smallpox cases across 37 Indiana counties that month; St. Joseph does not appear in the county list as read. That is the whole of the county's smallpox in the official returns reached: a six-case summer line in 1907, an absence in 1914.
Mishawaka's own smallpox record is older and is another file's: the smallpox that stands on this ground in the deep record is the c. 1820 sickness in the Potawatomi village whose abandonment the Story of Mishawaka section and tribes files of this history own; it is pointed to here and not retold. For the town era — the era of the bulletins, the health officers and the Enterprise — no Mishawaka smallpox case, outbreak, quarantine or pesthouse stands in any record reached. The article prints the gap inside itself, with its settlers named: the State Board of Health Monthly Bulletin run, and the Mishawaka Enterprise on MPHPL film. A disease can be historically real in a place and documentary absent from it; smallpox in town-era Mishawaka is, on the present record, exactly that.
Sources
- U.S. Public Health Reports, morbidity table (reports to 6 December 1907) — "St. Joseph County — South Bend… June 16–July 20… 6" cases, no deaths recorded.
- Indiana State Board of Health, Monthly Bulletin, December 1914, read first-hand — 386 smallpox cases in 37 counties; St. Joseph not in the county list as read.
- Spine and tribes files of this record — the c. 1820 Potawatomi village smallpox and abandonment, owned there; pointer only.