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2 OCTOBER 1918 · STATE ORDER 6–7 OCTOBER · STATE TOTALS IN CONFLICT (C123)
The epidemic reached this town by name, on a dated line in the state's own chronology. The Indiana State Archives' influenza chronology (compiled from the Indianapolis Star) records for 2 October 1918 that cases had appeared across Indiana in a list of named communities including, verbatim, "cases in South Bend, North Liberty, Walkerton, and other communities around Indiana" — the earliest dated proof reached that the epidemic had reached this town. No case count for the town is given by the carrier, and none is printed here. The orders that bound the town followed within the week: on 6–7 October 1918 the Indiana State Board of Health telegraphed the secretary of every county board of health ordering the immediate closure of all schools, churches, theaters and amusements and a ban on all public meetings and gatherings, statewide — the only school/church closure in this township's proven record — and required the homes of flu patients to be placarded "QUARANTINE." The county seat's own course prints at pointer: Dr. Emil G. Freyermuth's 11 October order closed South Bend's gatherings until 9 November, and on 25 October a state official declared at least 750 active cases in the city after interviewing fourteen physicians — the carrier's own caveat being that this far exceeded the number reported to the city health office. The toll prints at the strength the record allows, which is none: no town-level or township-level influenza death count exists in any carrier reached, and no county total exists in the federal count — the Census Bureau's Special Tables of Mortality from Influenza and Pneumonia (1920) compile Indiana by groups of counties only, and St. Joseph County is never separated. The town's share, and the county's, are therefore printed UNCOUNTED, settler in the note (the county's death records; the town paper for the windows named). The state's figures print whole and unmerged (C123), because they count differently by construction: the Indiana Historical Bureau's summary — by the end of November 1918, Indiana had lost 3,266 residents to the disease (influenza, as the Bureau frames it); Notre Dame Magazine's — by 20 November, 3,386 deaths statewide from the influenza and pneumonia outbreak (the wider cause definition); and a press-derived retrospective's — more than 14,000 Indiana residents dead in 1918, more than 150,000 infected between 8 September 1918 and 15 March 1919 (a longer window, an all-forms count). The township's one flu-adjacent named loss is a soldier's, and it is the veterans lane's, pointed to only: the county Gold Star roll records county men dying of influenza-pneumonia in the camps — camp deaths of county men, not deaths in the town — and no Liberty Township name among them is claimed here.
Indiana State Archives influenza chronology (Indiana History Blog, from the Indianapolis Star); Indiana Historical Bureau (state order, citing Princeton Daily Clarion, 7 Oct. 1918, and the Board's telegram); "Another Deadly Contagion," Notre Dame Magazine; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Special Tables of Mortality (1920).