The City Hall plaque of 2024, and the two rolls that do not agree

2024

The memorial: In November 2024 the city installed in the lobby of Mishawaka City Hall an exhibit honoring Mishawaka's Civil War soldiers, at its center a wooden memorial made by Artworks Sign Company of Mishawaka, headed "IN MEMORIAM" and inscribed: "We pay reverent tribute to these soldiers of Mishawaka who made the supreme sacrifice for their country during the Civil War, April 12, 1861 – April 9, 1865." Below the inscription, fifty engraved name plates stand in six columns. With the plaque the city displays a preserved Civil War battle flag that belonged to Barnet Byrkit, captain of Company F of the 48th Indiana, donated by his great-granddaughter and conserved by the city. The fifty names, transcribed from the city's own published photograph of the plaque, are printed whole in the memorials article below.

The cross-check, printed whole: This pass checked every one of the fifty names against Chapman's Roll of Honor of 1880, the county's printed necrology. Thirty-four of the fifty stand on that Roll — twenty-eight in the same form, and six more under the forms the nineteenth century used: the officers Houghton and Pettit, printed by Chapman among the officers in natural order; Criswell; Bonney; Fountain; and Benjamin Schmidt, whom the plaque spells Schmitt. Most of the sixteen stand in the printed company rosters as men who served — Kyle, Edinger, Dielmann (as Dellman), Guibert, Barnhart, and Morse all appear in the county companies' rosters as Chapman and Howard print them — but their deaths in service are carried, in the record, by the city's plaque alone. The city's compilation plainly rests on research of its own, whose sources it has not published; the plaque is the city's statement, and it stands here as that, neither endorsed beyond the thirty-four verifications nor dismissed for the sixteen.

The disagreement runs both ways: The rolls, for their part, document three named dead of Mishawaka's own Company F — Henry Lahman, killed at Kingston; William H. Wilson, died in the field in South Carolina; James R. Wedgworth, died at Columbia — and not one of the three stands on the city's plaque, nor does the unnamed substitute who died at Louisville. A reader who takes either roll alone will miss men the other proves. Both are therefore printed in this record, each at its own strength: the company's dead from the state roster and the county Roll, and the city's fifty from the plaque, with the overlap and the absences stated in the open. The settling work is named among the gaps: the sixteen names want testing against the adjutant general's unit rosters and the men's compiled service records, and Lahman, Wilson, and Wedgworth want the city's answer.

Sources:

1. City of Mishawaka, news release of November 7, 2024, on the City Hall Civil War exhibit, the memorial plaque, and the Byrkit flag; the plaque's names transcribed from the city's published photograph of the memorial.
2. Charles C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), Roll of Honor, pp. 444–448; Timothy E. Howard (1907), company rosters reprinted.
3. W. H. H. Terrell, Report of the Adjutant General of Indiana, vol. 5, Company F, 48th Regiment.