War spikes, at anchor size only: the wheat economy under two war demands

Row #11 · 1917–18 and 1941–45, brief by design; settlers named for the rest

This row is an anchor, not a treatment: it fixes what the ground produced under war demand, briefly, and names the records that would carry it whole. For 1917–18 the state's own war history measures the demand: Indiana's food-production campaign of 1917, run through the State Council of Defense's food committee with USDA backing, answered a federal call for a twenty-percent increase in winter-wheat acreage — and the state account records the demand met, Indiana planting 2,500,000 acres of wheat in the fall of 1917 against 2,116,000 in 1916. On this ground that demand landed on a working wheat system at its directory fullest — the 1916–17 roll's Farmers Grain Co. and New Carlisle Milling Co. are the war years' own picture of the town's grain machinery, one canvass before the planting — and on the township's farms, whose two named dead of that war in the state's Gold Star roll are Stanley Paszkiet, a farmer of the Terre Coupee Polish settlement, and James W. Swanson. No township acreage or bushel figure for 1917–18 stands in the record reached, and none is estimated. For 1941–45 the county frame is published and exact at its grain: the federal crop-estimates table for Indiana wheat gives St. Joseph County 20,200 acres harvested in 1941 yielding 25.7 bushels to the acre — 519,900 bushels of wheat in the war's first crop year, against 408,300 in 1940 — a county spike, printed as a county figure, not apportioned to the township. The town's machinery in those years is the gap inside the anchor: the milling and elevator course of 1941–45 sits in the same unreached mid-century record as the ladder's missing rungs.

Sources:

1. Centennial History and Handbook of Indiana / Indiana State Council of Defense food-committee account: the 1917 food-production campaign; the federal call for a 20 percent winter-wheat increase; Indiana plantings 2,500,000 acres (fall 1917) against 2,116,000 (1916).
2. Polk (1916–17), read whole: Farmers Grain Co.; New Carlisle Milling Co.
3. Indiana Gold Star Honor Roll (1921), as banked: Paszkiet (farmer) and Swanson, the township's named dead of 1917–19.
4. U.S. Bureau of Agricultural Economics / federal crop-estimates table, Indiana — All Wheat (1939–41 county table): St. Joseph County, 1941 — 20,200 acres, 25.7 bushels per acre, 519,900 bushels; 1940 — 408,300 bushels.
5. Joseph County tally 430, unapportioned.