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1837 – present
Before there was a charity in Liberty Township there was an office charged with the poor, and it was the trustee's. Indiana's township system made the trustee the overseer of the poor for the township — the officer who received applications, investigated need and issued relief — and that statutory course, not a voluntary society, is the first relief institution on this ground. No carrier reached preserves a township poor-relief ledger, a poor count, or a county-home admission charged to Liberty Township, and the county-home article the floor checklist builds on — the poorhouse-to-residence course that belongs to South Bend's record — prints here at boundary size only: St. Joseph County's home stood outside this township, North Liberty residents' use of it is unquantified in any carrier reached, and the settler for both items is the township trustee's poor-relief records and the county home's admission registers.