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The county pattern, and Mishawaka's named gap
What the county record states: Beside every Grand Army post of the era stood, in the usual course, a Woman's Relief Corps — the Grand Army's recognized auxiliary, whose work was relief of veterans and their families and the care of the graves and the day. The county history's Grand Army account states the pattern for St. Joseph County's posts generally: each post has its women's auxiliary, and the corps have "always been actively engaged in assisting men of the Grand Army in every way possible." The same account gives one corps in full — organized 13 May 1885, with its president and officers named — but the passage as it survives in the record reached belongs to the county narrative without naming Mishawaka's corps apart from South Bend's, and this record does not assign it across the river.
Mishawaka's own corps, at the strength reached:The honest print is therefore two-part: a corps beside Houghton Post is what the county pattern and the county history's general statement support, and its particular record is a named gap. The settling sources are the Woman's Relief Corps Department of Indiana's journals and corps registers, the Mishawaka Enterprise's society columns, and the Houghton Post minutes at the state archives, where a corps working beside the post would appear. South Bend's corps record — the Norman Eddy W.R.C. holding its installation in its corps rooms in November 1918, and the Relief Corps' erection of the 1911 monument to the unknown dead — stands whole in South Bend's veterans record and is not Mishawaka's to claim.
Sources:
- Howard, A History of St. Joseph County (1907), Grand Army account as preserved in the county record — the general statement on the posts' auxiliaries and the 13 May 1885 corps organization, printed here at the county strength the text supports and no stronger.
- South Bend veterans record of this history — the Norman Eddy W.R.C. and the 1911 monument, boundary-printed.