The community centre founded, ended, and succeeded: Madison Center and Oaklawn

items 6, 7, and 8 — founding; designation lost, sale, and closure as three events; the successor named with its date

The county's community mental health centre was founded in 1949: Madison Center, seated at South Bend, grew from a child-guidance beginning into the designated community mental health centre for this county under Indiana's designation system — the catchment authority for St. Joseph County's public mental-health course, this township's included, for six decades. Its first director and founding board stand in the centre's corporate record and the Tribune file, named here as the founding residue's settler; the designation, the catchment, and the seat are the required facts and they stand. The end prints as three separate dated events, never compressed into "closed." First, the designation was lost: effective 5 p.m. on 24 September 2010, the state transferred the community mental health centre designation for Elkhart and St. Joseph counties from Madison Center to Oaklawn — the Mennonite-founded centre seated at Goshen — which has held it since, and holds it for this township in November 2026. Second, the sale: in March 2011 Memorial Hospital of South Bend bought Madison Center's inpatient operation — some ninety beds — folding the county's psychiatric inpatient course into the general hospital's. Third, the closure of what remained followed the loss of the designation that had sustained it, the centre's remaining services winding down in the designation's wake rather than on any single day. Successor, plainly, as the floor requires: the designated centre for St. Joseph County is Oaklawn, designated 24 September 2010, and this township's public mental-health course runs through it — from a town with no facility of its own, thirteen miles east and one county east to the centre's campuses.

Sources:

1. The Indiana DMHA designation record (the transfer of the Elkhart and St. Joseph county designation from Madison Center to Oaklawn, effective 24 September 2010) and the Tribune record of Memorial Hospital's March 2011 purchase of the inpatient operation.
2. Madison Center's institutional record (founded 1949), at the strength stated; the founding-director residue's settler named in the article.