The farmers' institutions, in a row, each dated

1852 – 1953

The county's farm organizations print as a dated row — society, Grange, mutual insurance, county agent, Farm Bureau — with the township's one named seat at the row's end. The St. Joseph County Agricultural Society was reorganized on 15 March 1858 under the act of 17 February 1852, and held its first fair on new grounds on 28–30 September 1858; by commissioners' order of 20 April 1881 the county bought 40 acres on the north side of the St. Joseph River between South Bend and Mishawaka for agricultural fairs; a Northern Indiana Agricultural Society formed on 3 February 1881 as a stock company at $5 shares; a new society formed on 31 March 1899 restored the name St. Joseph County Agricultural Society; the society surrendered the county grounds on 4 June 1903, and the grounds passed to the City of South Bend's custody on 3 April 1906, becoming a public park. The Grange: Howard's chapter section "The Grange, Farmers' Institutes, etc." opens by naming "St. Joseph Valley Grange, No. 584" the county's most successful — a county grange, not a township hall; a Grange hall in Liberty Township is named in no carrier searched, a tested negative at search strength whose settlers are Howard's section read whole and the Indiana State Grange's charter records. The farmers' mutual fire insurance company has its own section of Howard's chapter, whose text was not read — a named gap — and no Liberty Township mutual is separately named in any carrier searched. The county agent and the Bureau: the Farm News of St. Joseph County's retrospective of June 1953 (read first-hand; its text survives in two-column-interleaved OCR and prints with that caveat) states that "our farm organization really began back in 1911 when our first county agent, John S. Bordner, served us," county agent from 1911 to 1918, and that "on Oct. 14, 1911, 22 farmers of St. Joseph County met"; a March 1913 date appears in the same interleaved text in connection with the county Farm Bureau's organization, and a first stock sale on 24 March 1920 with W. C. Harder as marketing chairman. The 1911 meeting and the March 1913 organization print as a bracketed, unresolved pair — the issue's page image is the settler — and the ordering prints explicitly because it looks like an error and, on these carriers, is not one: the county organization of 1911/1913 predates the Indiana Farm Bureau itself, founded 25 March 1919. The 1911 appointment is also Purdue Extension's arrival at county strength on this record — with two flags riding on it: the date predates the Smith-Lever Act of 1914, and it rests on the 1953 retrospective alone; Purdue's own appointment record stands as a named gap. The township's seat in the row: the same June 1953 Farm News names William Cullar of Liberty — Liberty Township — as "County Chairman" in a Farm Bureau list context, printed at exactly that strength.