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1907
The count: Timothy E. Howard's History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907) gives Mishawaka a chapter of its own, and its section on "Societies and Clubs" is the fullest single picture of the membership city ever printed. Howard carries two bodies at narrative length — the Odd Fellows and the Masons, each with its own entry below — and then prints what he calls a roster "of about all the other societies and clubs of the city as they now exist," each with its officers for the year. The roster runs: Fidelity Rebekah Lodge No. 122 of the Odd Fellows; Mishawaka Lodge No. 130, Free and Accepted Masons; Houghton Post No. 128 of the Grand Army of the Republic; Mishawaka Tribe No. 304 of the Improved Order of Red Men; two courts of the Foresters — the Independent Order's St. John's Court No. 1490 and the Catholic Order's St. John's Court No. 952, with a Sacred Heart Court for the Catholic Order's women; the Knights and Ladies of Columbia, Mishawaka Council No. 2; two tents of the Maccabees, Mishawaka Tent No. 12 of the Knights and Twentieth Century Tent No. 1121 of the Modern Maccabees; the Annex Christian Association; the Catholic Benevolent Legion's St. Joseph Valley Council No. 503; the Catholic Knights of America's St. Michael's Branch; Mishawaka Lodge No. 453 of the Knights of Pythias, with its own Uniform Rank company; the Ladies' Branch of the Woodmen of the World, Home Grove Circle No. 10; the Ladies of the Maccabees, Mishawaka Hive No. 68, and the Ladies of the Modern Maccabees, Mishawaka Hive No. 907; the Royal Arch Masons' Mishawaka Chapter No. 83; the Masonic Club of Mishawaka; the Order of the Eastern Star's Mishawaka Chapter No. 26; the Mishawaka Court of Honor, District Court No. 167; the Modern Woodmen of America's Mishawaka Camp No. 4788; and the Woodmen of the World's Enterprise Camp.
What the roster shows: Read as a map, the 1907 roster is the town in miniature. The Catholic benefit orders cluster thickest — Foresters, Catholic Knights, the Benevolent Legion, the Knights and Ladies of Columbia — the club infrastructure of the Belgian and German parishes. Nearly every men's order stands with a women's body beside it: a Rebekah lodge beside the Odd Fellows, an Eastern Star chapter beside the Masons, hives beside the Maccabee tents. And the roster's silences are as documentary as its entries. No Elks lodge stands in it, and none stands in the county chapter's account of the order either, which knows Elks in this county by South Bend's lodge alone. No country club stands in it, though a golf club had been organized on the river bluff seven years before — the club world Howard counted was the lodge world, and the golf club belonged to a different Mishawaka, one his census did not reach. Both silences are taken up in their own entries below.
Sources:
- Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, Vol. I (1907), Mishawaka chapter, "Societies and Clubs," pp. 344–345 — the roster and the two narrative accounts, read first-hand.