1898: the war that found Mishawaka without a company

1898 – 1900 · the Spanish-American War and the reorganization

The institutional fact: When the war with Spain came in the spring of 1898, Mishawaka had been without a company for five and a half years, and the war's organization shows it. The county's company in federal service was South Bend's Company F; Elkhart kept its Company E, the Third Regiment company that had stood beside Mishawaka's D in the 1891 and 1892 organizations. Mishawaka's guardsmen of record went to war inside those two neighbors' companies: William H. Hopkins of Mishawaka was first sergeant of Elkhart's Company E; Benjamin E. Addis of Mishawaka was a private of the same company; Steven Krushanzki of Mishawaka was a private and a recruit of South Bend's Company F. The town's Spanish-American roll is four names long, its death roll zero, and the names and their service stand whole in the Wars record of this history. What belongs to this section is the shape underneath the names: in the only war of its Guard generation, Mishawaka contributed men and no unit — a first sergeant, two privates and a fourth man whose names survive precisely because they were written into other towns' company books.

A Mishawaka officer without a Mishawaka company: The reorganization that followed the war put one Mishawaka man on the Third Regiment's staff. Lieutenant Harry R. Ford of Mishawaka, appointed battalion adjutant of the regiment's First Battalion on 10 July 1900, had begun his service in Company G, First Regiment Infantry, of the Ohio National Guard, risen to first sergeant there before removing to Indiana, gone to the war with Spain as battalion sergeant major of the 157th Indiana, and been commissioned battalion adjutant in federal service on 11 July 1898. His battalion on his appointment consisted of Company F of South Bend, Company E of Elkhart, Company B of Rochester and Company H of Warsaw — the northern companies of the regiment, not one of them Mishawaka's. Ford's adjutancy is the last entry of Mishawaka in the Guard's institutional record: a staff officer of the regiment, of this city, at a headquarters staff table — and no company under him that the city could call its own, then or after.

Sources:

1. William D. Pratt, A History of the National Guard of Indiana (1901) — the First Battalion's composition and officers at the reorganization, including Lieutenant Harry R. Ford of Mishawaka, battalion adjutant from 10 July 1900, and his service record; the Spanish-American rosters naming Hopkins, Addis and Krushanzki under Elkhart's and South Bend's companies.
2. Wars record of this history — Mishawaka's Spanish-American roll whole: four names, no dead, from the roster record.