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December 1861 – July 1865
The town's own company: Where the 9th's company was the county's, the 48th Indiana's Company F was Mishawaka's by the testimony of a man who marched in it. Thomas Crakes of Penn Township, whose biography Chapman prints, "enlisted in the army, in company F., 48th Ind. Inf. Vol., at Mishawaka, under the command of Captain Burket" — Barnett Byrkit in the rosters' spelling, the captain under whom the company went out and who rose from it to major and then lieutenant colonel of the regiment. Crakes stands in the company's corporal list in both Chapman's printing of the roster and the adjutant general's. Another Penn Township man, Isaac H. Gilman, whose post office was Mishawaka, enlisted in 1861 at Goshen under the 48th's colonel, Norman Eddy, served three years and eight months, and fought at Iuka, at Florence, and through the siege of Vicksburg; his biography does not name his company, and he is printed unassigned, at that strength.
The regiment's frame: The 48th was organized at Goshen between December 5, 1861, and January 28, 1862. Chapman states that the regiment was "represented by three entire companies of St. For the regiment whole, Dyer's accounting gives 267 dead: four officers and eighty-eight enlisted men killed or mortally wounded, and one hundred seventy-five enlisted men dead of disease. The regiment mustered out at Louisville on July 15, 1865.
The residence the state printed: The adjutant general's roster of the 48th, in the fifth volume of Terrell's report, prints each man's residence at county level only — "St. Joseph co" — so the state record cannot itself separate Mishawaka's company from South Bend's two. The identification of Company F as the Mishawaka company rests on Chapman: on Crakes's biography, which names the town and the captain together, and on the agreement of the rosters. It is printed at that strength, which is the strength of a contemporary county history speaking of its own town's company — and it is corroborated by everything the later city record does with Byrkit's name, down to the battle flag his great-granddaughter gave the city in 2024, carried in the memorials article below.
Sources:
- Charles C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), ch. VII, the 48th Infantry, pp. 422–425; Penn Township biographies (Thomas Crakes, p. 769; Isaac H. Gilman).
- W. H. H. Terrell, Report of the Adjutant General of Indiana, vol. 5, roster of the 48th Regiment, Company F, pp. 459–461.
- Frederick H. Dyer, A Compendium of the War of the Rebellion (1908), 48th Regiment Indiana Infantry.