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Founding not in the record reached – today · 1307 East Jefferson Boulevard
What the record fixes: Mishawaka's Veterans of Foreign Wars post is Post 360, seated at 1307 East Jefferson Boulevard, and it is a going concern: the post keeps its own website, its own telephone (574-255-4125) and email, a canteen with weekly hours, and an Auxiliary — the post's site carries the Auxiliary's own address and its standing third-Sunday pancake breakfasts. The post's present officers stand in the public record at the strength of public roles: in 2023 the city's Memorial Day account names Dan Gann as Post 360's commander, the man "responsible for rebuilding" the city's parade, in the city's words. In November 2026 the post was billed, in the Tribune's Veterans Day listings, as host of the Michiana Concert Band's Veterans Day concert at the post, with a light meal afterward for veterans and their families — the post home in its present role as one of the town's ceremonial rooms.
The founding that will not settle:The post's own website carries the national organization's history but no post history; the department's public rosters fix the post's present seat and no more; and the contemporary press run that would carry an institution notice — the Mishawaka Enterprise and the South Bend News-Times of the early 1920s — is digitized only in part (the News-Times' Hoosier State Chronicles run ends in the early 1920s, and the Enterprise is undigitized altogether, as the Newspapers record of this history establishes). This record therefore prints the founding of Post 360 as a named gap, and declines the two shortcuts the material invites: the post number proves nothing about a date (VFW numbers were not issued in strict chronology), and the national organization's 1922 first poppy distribution, printed on the post's own site as national history, is not the post's. The settling sources are the Veterans of Foreign Wars' national and Department of Indiana charter records, and the Enterprise run at the Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library.
The post's documented course: What can be told whole is the course the public record does carry. By 1946 Post 360 was one of the three organizations that chartered the veterans' housing corporation of the Normain Heights entry below — a post strong enough, by then, to be a founder of the town's largest veterans' work. Its postwar course between that charter and the present is thin in the record reached; its modern course is the ceremonial one the city record shows: presenter, with the Legion and the city, of the Memorial Day observance in its own entry below, keeper of the cemetery services that open that day, and host of the town's Veterans Day concert. The post's hall at 1307 East Jefferson — when it was built, what stood there before, and where the post met before it — is part of the same named gap as the founding, settled by the same sources.
Sources:
- VFW Post 360, the post's own website (vfw360.org), read November 2026 — the post's seat, telephone, Auxiliary and its breakfasts, and the absence of any post history there, printed as found.
- City of Mishawaka, Memorial Day Parade account (2023) — Commander Dan Gann and the parade's rebuilding.
- South Bend Tribune, Veterans Day events listing, 3 November 2026 — the Michiana Concert Band concert at Post 360, 1307 E. Jefferson Blvd.
- Wars record of this history — the post's present seat and activity as there verified.