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c. 1843 – the line documented to 1921
The first lodge: The Odd Fellows were Mishawaka's first club body. St. Joseph Lodge, No. 27, of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows was organized, Howard writes, about 1843 — within a decade of the town's platting — and its membership was the town's first generation: among its members Howard names Dr., afterwards Colonel, Norman Eddy, John Niles, Albert Cass, Harris E. Hurlbut, A. H. Long and James Easton. The lodge was afterwards discontinued; Howard gives no date, and the discontinuance stands as he left it.
Monitor Lodge: The order returned on 13 August 1867, when Monitor Lodge, No. 286, was instituted with A. H. Long, James Easton, Washington Gibson, Philip McElvain and Thomas S. Long as charter members — two of them carried over from the first lodge's roll. Five years later the lodge met the town's catastrophe: on 5 September 1872 the great fire that took some ninety percent of the business district destroyed the lodge hall "with all its costly furniture." The lodge rebuilt finer than it had been — a new hall in the Phoenix building — and Howard, writing in 1907, reports it "still in a flourishing condition." The directory record carries the hall forward: in 1921 the Odd Fellows Hall stood at 202½ North Main, and Houghton Post of the Grand Army met in the Odd Fellows Temple at 204 North Main — the lodge's rooms serving as the town's meeting ground, as lodge rooms did. The women's side of the order stands in Howard's roster as Fidelity Rebekah Lodge No. 122. Monitor Lodge's course after 1921 — its later halls, its present state — is not documented in the records reached for this section and is named among its gaps; the Grand Lodge of Indiana's institution records are the settling source.
Sources:
- Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, Vol. I (1907), pp. 344–345 — St. Joseph Lodge No. 27, Monitor Lodge No. 286, the 1872 fire and the Phoenix Building hall, read first-hand.
- R. L. Polk & Co., South Bend City Directory, 1921, Mishawaka section — Odd Fellows Hall, 202½ N. Main; the G.A.R. post meeting in Odd Fellows Temple, 204 N. Main; Fidelity Rebekah Lodge in Howard's roster.