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c. 1843 – the line documented to 2001
The first lodge, and the dissolved body: The Odd Fellows were Mishawaka's first order. 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 first generation of the town itself: Dr., afterwards Colonel, Norman Eddy; John Niles; Albert Cass; Harris E. Hurlbut; A. H. Long; and James Easton stand in Howard's list. The lodge "was afterwards discontinued" — Howard gives no date, and the discontinuance stands exactly as he left it: a chartered body that died somewhere in the town's first decades, whole at the size its record stands, its settling book the Grand Lodge of Indiana's institution records. Its number tells its own story of the order's age in Indiana — No. 27, in a state whose Odd Fellowship was then young.
Monitor Lodge, and the fire: 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 — Long and Easton carried over from the first lodge's roll, so that the second lodge was in part the first lodge's survivors refounding it. Five years on, the lodge met the town's catastrophe: on 5 September 1872 the great fire destroyed the lodge hall "with all its costly furniture." The lodge rebuilt finer — a new hall in the Phoenix building — and Howard, in 1907, reports it "still in a flourishing condition." The order's family filled in around it: Fidelity Rebekah Lodge No. 122, the women's branch of Odd Fellowship, stands in the 1907 roster with Mrs. Vona Borden as Noble Grand — the Rebekah degree itself being, at the county level, the work of the county's own Schuyler Colfax, whose authorship of it belongs to South Bend's record and is boundary-printed in this clause only. By 1921 the Odd Fellows Temple stood at 204 North Main, and the lodge's rooms had become the town's meeting ground in fact: Houghton Post of the Grand Army met in the Odd Fellows Temple, as the directory records and the Grand Army entry below repeats.
The long survival: Monitor Lodge's course runs further in the record than any other Mishawaka lodge's but the Masons'. In 2001 the Tribune put a photograph before its readers — an old lodge-room picture, its occasion forgotten — and the identification that came back, from a member of fifty-five years' standing in the order, placed it without question, in his judgment, at an Odd Fellows meeting of Monitor Lodge 286 at 204 North Main Street: the same temple address the directory gives in 1921, with the lodge still meeting in it at the turn of the present century, a hundred and thirty-four years after its institution. The lodge's state after 2001 is not established in the records reached for this section — the Sovereign Grand Lodge's directory as consulted does not carry its current standing in a form that can be printed — and the Grand Lodge of Indiana's institution and consolidation records are the named settling source. What is documented is the arc: instituted 1867 out of the first lodge's remnant, burned out in 1872, rebuilt, and meeting in its own temple into the 2000s.
Sources:
- Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, Vol. I (1907), pp. 344–345 — St. Joseph Lodge No. 27 and its members, the discontinuance, Monitor Lodge's institution and charter members, the 1872 fire and the Phoenix Building hall; Fidelity Rebekah Lodge No. 122 from the roster; read first-hand.
- R. L. Polk & Co., South Bend City Directory, 1921 — the Odd Fellows Temple, 204 N. Main; Houghton Post meeting there; as carried in the Private Clubs section of this history.
- South Bend Tribune, 2001 (ProQuest newspaper record) — the photograph identification at Monitor Lodge 286, 204 N. Main St., and the fifty-five-year member's account.