The tests: no Prince Hall lodge, no Mishawaka klavern, in the record reached

Tested against Howard, Polk, and the orders' records · negatives at the strength of the search

The Prince Hall test: South Bend's lodge world was doubled by race — a Prince Hall lodge, St. Peter's No. 31, with its own chapter and commandery, stands whole in that city's record. Mishawaka's was not, in any record reached. Howard's roster of 1907, which misses little, carries no Black body of any order; the 1921 directory's Mishawaka societies columns, read whole, carry none; and the Veterans section of this history ran the parallel test for the veterans' posts against the department indexes and the federal and state records, with the same result. The demographic frame is the Culture record's: Mishawaka's Black community through the lodge age was very small, its growth a later century's story. The negative is printed at that strength — no Prince Hall lodge, no Black order of any kind, stands in Mishawaka's published lodge record — and the settling source, if a body met unrecorded, is the Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Indiana's proceedings. Black Mishawaka's own institutions of the era stand where the record carries them, in the Culture and Neighborhoods sections, and are not this section's to invent a lodge for.

The Klan test: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s was, in form, one more secret order of the lodge age — chartered local units, ritual, regalia, dues — and it organized in this county, as South Bend's record documents whole: a klavern there from 1923, broken as an organization by 1926. For Mishawaka the test returns a narrower result. A St. Joseph County Klan existed as an organization — the scholarly history of the Indiana Klan records the county Klan's annual picnic at Lake Maxinkuckee, a basket dinner and a ball game between its fat and lean members — but no Mishawaka klavern, unit number, officer or hall stands in any source reached for this section: Howard and Polk both predate the Indiana Klan's rise, and the targeted search of the order's county record returns the county organization and South Bend's documented klavern, and no Mishawaka unit. That is printed at its strength: Mishawaka's Klan, if it existed as more than members of a county body, is unrecorded in the sources reached, and the settling sources are the Mishawaka Enterprise's run for 1923–26 and the Klan's own Indiana records. The Elks test — no Mishawaka lodge — was run whole in the Private Clubs section and is not repeated here.

Sources:

1. Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, Vol. I (1907), pp. 344–345, and R. L. Polk & Co., South Bend City Directory, 1921, Mishawaka societies columns — both read whole for the absences stated.
2. The Veterans and Culture sections of this history — the parallel post test and its record classes; the Black community's documented scale in the lodge era.
3. James H. Madison, The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland (Indiana University Press, 2020) — the St. Joseph County Klan's annual picnic at Lake Maxinkuckee; the South Bend organization and its course stand whole in the South Bend build's Secret Societies section.