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After 1879
The post and its name: Mishawaka's Grand Army of the Republic post was Houghton Post, No. 128. Howard's county history records that it was mustered after the reorganization of the Department of Indiana, and that it was formed out of the membership of Auten Post of South Bend — the county's veterans first organized under the name of the county's first martyr, and Mishawaka's men then took a post of their own under the name of their own captain: James Houghton of Company I, 9th Indiana, killed at Shiloh on April 7, 1862. That is the whole of the post's war-service side that belongs here — the name itself is a war record, the town's judgment, made while the men who served under Houghton still filled the post's chairs, of whose name its Civil War should be remembered by. The post's institutional course — its halls, officers, encampments, and end — belongs to the fraternal-and-civic leg and is cross-referenced, not duplicated.
The wider order: The Grand Army's presence framed the town's memory work for two generations: the soldiers' monument of 1884 in Battell Park was raised by the citizens of Penn Township in the post's era, and the battle names cut into its faces — Shiloh first among the four on its base — are the names of the fields where the post's own members had fought and where Houghton and Miller fell. The monument's course is carried in the memorials article below.
Sources:
- Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), vol. 2, Grand Army of the Republic section (Houghton Post, No. 128, and its origin in Auten Post).
- Charles C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), Roll of Honor (Houghton; Auten).