The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1917 – 1918
The Fourth Liberty Loan: Mishawaka's war was financed in public, and the South Bend News-Times of October 6, 1918, in its Mishawaka page, recorded the Fourth Liberty Loan campaign in the town as it closed. The quota laid on Mishawaka and Penn Township together was eight hundred thousand dollars. The town's manufacturers' committee, under its chairman George H. Williams, had secured the largest part of its share before the campaign formally opened — the paper says the committee held a single meeting and prepared the entire amount committed to it in advance. In the general canvass the town, in the paper's phrase, "went a million dollars and better," and its editorial voice made the boast plain: "It took Mishawaka exactly one minute after the campaign opened to raise better than its quota," and "Mishawaka is in the war." The figures are the paper's own, printed here as the contemporary press account they are; the same page already looks ahead to a fifth loan "early in the New Year," which came in the spring of 1919 as the Victory Loan.
The Red Cross chapter: The same October page carries the town's Red Cross account: final payments on pledges to the second Red Cross war fund fell due on October 1, 1918, payments were coming in well, and "the Mishawaka chapter will again be a 100 percent chapter" — the town had a chapter of its own, distinct from the county chapter at South Bend whose seventy-thousand-dollar war-relief goal of June 1917 belongs to the county frame. The chapter's workrooms, its garment and surgical-dressing quotas, and its officers stand in the Mishawaka Enterprise
The women's registration, at county strength: South Bend's record carries the county frame for the women's war registration: 27,575 women of St. Joseph County registered for war work under the Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense, 2,713 of them at work in South Bend's factories. Mishawaka's own share of that registration is not separated in the record — the town's mills, Ball Band above all, ran on women's labor through the war years, but the number belongs to the county's arithmetic and is not divided here by guess. Ball Band's war work itself — what the mill made for the first war — is the Ball Band leg's to tell, and that leg names its own gap plainly: the company's First World War contracts are not itemized in the record it reached. Both statements stand as cross-references at pointer size.
Sources:
- South Bend News-Times, October 6, 1918, Mishawaka general-news page (Hoosier State Chronicles, Indiana's digital newspaper program): Fourth Liberty Loan quota and canvass; Red Cross second war fund notice.
- South Bend News-Times, June 21, 1917 (Hoosier State Chronicles): the county chapter's $70,000 war-relief goal.
- South Bend pass, WWI home-front file (the county women's registration, 27,575, and factory figure, 2,713); Mishawaka Ball Band leg file, the First World War contracts gap as named there.