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Founded 1917 · hall built 1928 · standing
The club: The club side of Mishawaka's Italian south side stands here at anchor size; the community's whole course — the immigration, the parishes, the feast days — is in the Culture and Neighborhoods sections, and is not re-dug here. What belongs to this section is the institution. The DeAmicis Mutual Aid Society, founded in 1917, was the south side's center, and in 1928 the society built its social hall at the northwest corner of Spring and Eleventh Streets — the clubhouse the commissioned history of the city says "the club continues to use today," and a working mutual-aid body still, filing its federal returns as the Edmondo Deamicis Mutual Society of Mishawaka and making its grants in the community's name in the present decade.
Two accounts, not merged: A second account of the club's line stands in the genealogical record and is printed beside the first, not folded into it. The South Bend Area Genealogical Society's page on the county's immigrant societies describes a "DeAmici Club" in Mishawaka into which the Liberty Club — an Italian club remembered for its popular brass band of the 1920s — was absorbed, and reports that club active in Mishawaka "to this day." Whether the genealogical society's DeAmici, with the Liberty Club inside it, and the commissioned history's DeAmicis Mutual Aid Society of 1917 are one body under two spellings of Edmondo De Amicis's name, or two, is not resolved in the records reached, and the two accounts stand separately here. The club world they agree on is the same either way: an Italian mutual-aid club on the south side, officered and hall-keeping from the 1910s into the present.
Sources:
- Peter J. De Kever, the commissioned Mishawaka history, as carried in the Culture section of this build — the DeAmicis Mutual Aid Society founded 1917, the hall at Spring and Eleventh built 1928, in the club's use at the history's writing.
- South Bend Area Genealogical Society, immigrant societies of St. Joseph County (submissions of Jim Piechorowski) — the DeAmici Club and the absorbed Liberty Club and its band; picture source there the South Bend Tribune, 17 January 1965.
- Internal Revenue Service Form 990 records — Edmondo Deamicis Mutual Society, Mishawaka, grants made in 2024.