Penn Township and the county desks: the servants across the line

1949 – today

The township trustee: Penn Township is Mishawaka's civil township — the city sits inside it — and its trustee was, in the years the directories cover, the poor-relief officer of everyone the city's charities did not reach. The classified pages of 1949 give the office a Lincolnway address and a man: "Penn Township Poor Relief, E. F. Aldrich, Trustee, 221 Lincolnway W," and the alphabetical pages give him whole: Earl P. Aldrich, township trustee, office at 221½ Lincolnway West, with the township assessor — A. E. Groff, the initials as the directory prints them — at 117¼ Lincolnway East. The trustee's office was a working welfare office with investigators and clerks on its staff (the directories' entries show a Penn Township Trustee's clerk and investigator in residents' occupations), and Aldrich held it in 1949 at the head of that small machinery. The line's other documented end is the present: the Women's History section records Doris Portolese as Penn Township Trustee in 2026. Between Aldrich and Portolese the trustees' names are not in the sources reached — a seventy-seven-year span with its ends documented and its middle a named gap, the settling records being the county auditor's township records and the directories of the intervening years.

The county desks, tested for a Mishawaka seat: The county officers sat in South Bend, and this section claims for Mishawaka only the holders the record ties to the city. The sheriff's line gives the tie whole: Stephen C. Hipsak holds the office in the 1949 directory's county pages, William J. Locks in 1963, and Dean Bolerjack — the city's own chief — sheriff in the 1971 directory, resident in Mishawaka, in the entry above. The prosecutor's line gives a negative at the size reached: the county prosecutors documented in the sources read — the county attorney of the 1949 directory, Wilford W. Walz, and the prosecuting attorney of 1971, William E. Voor Jr. — are South Bend's frame, carried in the South Bend section's own public-servants record, and no prosecutor seated in or from Mishawaka appears in the record reached; the test is printed as a test, the county's full succession being the South Bend file's to keep. The county bench gives one Mishawaka name: the 1949 directory's court pages name the judge of Superior Court No. 1, Hon. J. Fred Bingham — the same J. Fred Bingham the Government section's 1917 campaign record shows speaking for the Democratic ticket in Mishawaka a generation earlier. He is not to be merged with E. Volney Bingham of the next-but-one entry — the Civil War veteran, postmaster and state senator born in 1844, who cannot have sat on a bench in 1949; two Binghams of Mishawaka's service, a near-name trap the record sets and this section declines, their kinship unstated in every source reached. The Bingham School of the 1921 directory's school list (606 East Third) carries the family name into the city's geography a generation before the judge's directory entry; whose name it carries, the naming record would settle, and it was not reached.

Sources:

1. R. L. Polk & Co., Polk's South Bend and Mishawaka City Directory (1949) — Penn Township Poor Relief, E. F. Aldrich, trustee; Penn Township Assessor A. E. Groff; county officers (Attorney Wilford W. Walz; Sheriff Stephen C. Hipsak); courts (Superior Court No. 1, Hon. J. Fred Bingham, judge).
2. R. L. Polk & Co., directories of 1963 and 1971 — Sheriff William J. Locks (1963); Prosecuting Attorney William E. Voor Jr. and Sheriff Dean Bolerjack (1971).
3. The Women's History section of this history — Doris Portolese, Penn Township Trustee (2026).