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1919 – 2026
What belongs here: The posts' institutional course — charters, halls, commanders, auxiliaries — belongs to the fraternal-and-civic leg. What belongs to the wars record is the work the posts did that was war work, and Mishawaka's posts did two pieces of it that outweigh everything else in this article's scope. The Grand Army's Houghton Post opened the course, and its naming is carried in its own article above.
The housing charter of 1946: When the Second World War's veterans came home to a town with no houses for them, it was the posts that organized the answer: American Legion Post 161 and Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 360 each appointed housing committees, joined with the rubber workers' Local 65, and chartered Veterans' Homes of Mishawaka, Inc., which built Normain Heights — 315 houses, 1947–49 — as the home-front article tells. That is the posts' largest single act of war service on the home ground, and it stands in the National Register's own nomination as the posts' work.
The name the Legion post now carries: Post 161, at 133 East Mishawaka Avenue, rededicated itself on Veterans Day 2007 as Ryan A. Balmer Post 161, for the town's Iraq dead, as the Balmer article records; it is active under that name in 2026. Post 360 of the Veterans of Foreign Wars stands at 1307 East Jefferson Boulevard and is likewise active — the Michiana Concert Band's Veterans Day concert was billed there in November 2026. The two posts' founding dates are not in the record: the Legion's auxiliary in Mishawaka holds a federal exemption ruling of January 1933, which dates the auxiliary's organization but not the post's charter, and this record declines to turn it into one. The settling sources are the charter records of the American Legion's Department of Indiana and of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the dates are entered among the gaps.
Sources:
- National Register of Historic Places nomination, Normain Heights Historic District (the posts' housing committees and the 1946 charter).
- Congressional Record, House, November 13, 2007 (the Balmer rededication); Indiana Alcohol and Tobacco Commission filings (the post's corporate name and address); South Bend Tribune, November 3, 2026, Veterans Day events listing (VFW Post 360, 1307 E. Jefferson Blvd.).
- Internal Revenue Service exempt-organization records for Mishawaka (American Legion Auxiliary ruling year 1933), used only at the strength stated.