Houghton Post No. 128: the Grand Army in Mishawaka

1883 – 1936 · Grand Army of the Republic, Department of Indiana

The post and its dates: Mishawaka's Grand Army of the Republic post was Houghton Post, No. 128. The Department of Indiana's own post records, as indexed by the Indiana Archives and Records Administration from the department's files, carry it at Mishawaka, St. Joseph County, with the dates 1883–1936 — a fifty-three-year course that makes it, with South Bend's Auten Post No. 8 (1879–1936 and beyond), one of the last two Grand Army posts in the county to go dark. The Sons of Union Veterans' Department of Indiana listing carries the same post, number and dates. The post's descriptive books and minutes survive in the department's records at the state archives — the finding aid indexes Houghton among the posts for which those series are held — and those books, not any published history, are the settling source for the post's membership, officers and meeting places, none of which the published record reached for this section carries.

How it was formed: Timothy Edward Howard's county history of 1907, in its Grand Army section, records that Houghton Post was mustered after the reorganization of the Department of Indiana and that it was formed out of the membership of Auten Post of South Bend. The sequence is the county's organizational geography in one sentence: St. Joseph County's Union veterans first organized together, in 1879, under the name of the county's first martyr, John Auten of South Bend; four years later Mishawaka's men took a post of their own. The Wars record of this history carries that formation in its war-service frame; what belongs here is the institution it created — a Mishawaka corporation of Union veterans that endured from the year the town's soldiers' monument was being planned until the middle of the Great Depression.

The name: The post took the name of Captain James Houghton of Company I, 9th Indiana Infantry, killed at Shiloh on 7 April 1862. Department posts could not be named for living persons, and Houghton had been dead twenty-one years when the post was chartered; the name was the town's judgment, made by men who had served under him, of whose name its Civil War should be remembered by. Houghton's service and death stand in the Wars record; here the name is printed at identification size, as the post's own first fact.

The post's era and its ground: The Grand Army's presence framed the town's memory work for two generations. The soldiers' monument of 1884 in Battell Park — raised by the citizens of Penn Township, its base cut with the battle names of the fields where the post's members had fought — dates from the post's second year, and the park it stands in remains the ground where the city's Memorial Day ceremony ends today, under other banners. The monument's fabric and course stand in the Parks & River and Wars records. No meeting hall of Houghton Post's is named in any record: whether the post ever owned a hall, or met throughout in rented rooms as its sister posts did, is a named gap, settled — if anywhere — by the post's minutes books at the state archives and the Mishawaka Enterprise's columns.

The end: The index closes the post in 1936, the same year the department's record closes Auten Post in all but a carried "and beyond." No account of Houghton Post's last meeting, last commander, or the disposition of its charter and colors is in the published record reached. The Grand Army's Indiana line itself ran to the final national encampment of 1949; Mishawaka's post had surrendered its place in that line thirteen years before, as its members died. What succeeded it in Mishawaka was not a successor organization but a new generation's own: the Legion post of the next entry had already been at work for seventeen years when Houghton Post closed.

Sources:

1. Indiana Archives and Records Administration, finding aid to the records of the Grand Army of the Republic, Department of Indiana (23 August 1982), the post index sorted by county and by number — Houghton Post, Mishawaka, No. 128, St. Joseph County, 1883–1936, with its record-series marks.
2. Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, Department of Indiana, post listings — Houghton No. 128 (1883–1936).
3. Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), vol. 2, Grand Army of the Republic section — the post's formation out of Auten Post's membership after the department's reorganization.
4. Wars record of this history — Houghton's company and death, the 1884 monument, and the post's war-service frame.