Founded Here, Flagged as Foundings: The Owls, and the Knights and Ladies of Columbia

Two national orders keep their founding or their home office in this county, and they are flagged here as foundings, which is a different fact from a chapter's existence. The Order of Owls was founded in South Bend on 20 November 1904, by John W. Talbot and seven associates, in the law offices of Talbot & Talbot — a fraternal order born in a county-seat law office, its Home Nest seated in South Bend, its growth the era's usual miracle: more than 600,000 members in 2,148 nests by the early 1920s. The supreme offices left for Hartford, Connecticut, by the 1930s, and the founder's own course ended in the federal record — Talbot's conviction under the Mann Act in 1921 — but the founding stands as the county's one creation of a national fraternity, and it is South Bend's: Mishawaka's share is membership in the nests of a South Bend order, not the founding. The second flag is a home office of a smaller kind. The Knights and Ladies of Columbia, a Catholic fraternal-benefit order, kept its supreme offices in South Bend in the record of Howard's 1907 county history: Supreme Counsellor Ormond Kennedy, Supreme Scribe John Roth, Supreme Cashier Elmer Crockett, Supreme Medical Director Cornelius H. Myers and Supreme Attorney Daniel Rich, all seated in the county seat — with South Bend holding Council No. 1, and Mishawaka holding Council No. 2, C. F. Taylor its scribe. The Mishawaka fact inside the founding frame is exact: this city's council was the order's second, chartered into a home-office order seated five miles west. Winona Council No. 39 completes the county list Howard gives. The entry's discipline is the flag itself: foundings and home offices are the rarest facts in a club record, and this county holds one of each — both seated in South Bend, with Mishawaka standing, in the second, as Council No. 2.