The wartime clock and the homecoming

1917–1919 · DAYLIGHT SAVING AS A WAR MEASURE · THE WELCOME HOME

The clock before the war measure: Mishawaka's time fight began as a local one, a year before daylight saving existed in law. The South Bend News-Times of July 14, 1917 reports the South Bend Ministerial Association, meeting at the YMCA on Friday evening, July 13, resolving that on the following Sunday all the churches of South Bend and Mishawaka would return to Central standard time — five churches (Grace M.E., First United Brethren, First Baptist, Mizpah Evangelical and Lowell Heights M.E.) returning that Sunday and the rest the next — and the Lee Company of Mishawaka Avenue announced its establishment would return to Central time on Monday, its employees having voted for Central time three to one. The twin cities had been keeping faster local time; in July 1917 they voted themselves back to the standard the railroads kept.

Daylight saving, 1918: the war made the clock federal. The Standard Time Act of 1918 (Public Law 65-106, signed March 19, 1918) imposed the first nationwide legal standard time and, as a war measure for fuel and production, daylight saving — clocks forward on the last Sunday of March 1918 and back on the last Sunday of October. The same act's cleaning-up of the zone lines placed the entire state of Indiana in the Central Time Zone; Mishawaka's 1918 placement was therefore Central, with daylight saving observed on the national dates. Congress repealed daylight saving over President Wilson's veto by Public Law 66-40 (August 20, 1919), effective the last Sunday of October 1919, and Indiana's one-year uniformity ended with it.

The gap inside the frame: how Mishawaka itself kept the 1918 change — the city's own notices, factory whistles and church hours on the last Sunday of March 1918 — was not found in the records read, and no account is invented. The settling sources are named: the Mishawaka Enterprise and the News-Times' Mishawaka page for March–April 1918.

The homecoming — a searched negative: no Mishawaka welcome-home celebration of 1919 was found. The searches run in November 2026 — for a Mishawaka welcome-home or homecoming observance for its returned soldiers, across the web and the Indiana Memory digital collections — returned Indianapolis's observance and other towns' parades, none of them Mishawaka's. The state frame is documented and stands at frame size only: Indiana's Welcome Home Day was May 7, 1919, in Indianapolis, where the 150th Field Artillery, Indiana's Rainbow Division regiment, some 1,800 Hoosiers home on the Leviathan (landed late April 25, 1919), marched under the Victory Arch — and where Governor Goodrich's appeal of April 29 and state chairman Will H. Wade's telegram of May 1 both tied finishing the Victory Loan to facing the returning men "with a clear record," the appeal under which St. Joseph County completed its allotment on May 9. Mishawaka's own course — a parade, a service, a Legion post's founding welcome — if the city kept one, sits in the settling sources named: the Enterprise and the News-Times' Mishawaka page for May through the summer of 1919, and the charter records of the city's American Legion post. Until those are read, the homecoming stands as a searched negative, printed as one.

Sources:

1. South Bend News-Times, July 14, 1917, p. 3 (churches of South Bend and Mishawaka return to Central standard time; the Lee Company vote), Hoosier State Chronicles.
2. Standard Time Act of 1918, Pub. L. 65-106 (signed March 19, 1918); repeal of daylight saving, Pub. L. 66-40 (August 20, 1919); Indiana placed wholly in the Central Time Zone under the 1918 act.
3. Walter S. Greenough, The War Purse of Indiana (1922), Victory Loan chapter (Welcome Home Day, May 7, 1919; the 150th Field Artillery; Governor Goodrich's appeal of April 29, 1919; Will H. Wade's telegram of May 1, 1919).
4. Searches run, November 2026: "Mishawaka welcome home soldiers 1919," "Mishawaka homecoming 1919 parade," Indiana Memory (digital.library.in.gov) — no Mishawaka observance returned.