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Nineteenth century – mid-twentieth
In the asylum era, a Liberty Township resident who could not be kept at home entered the county's provision, not a town institution. Indiana's course ran from the county poor asylum — where the insane poor were lodged among the poor generally, in numbers and conditions the county's reports gave — to commitment by court order to a state hospital. For St. Joseph County the state-hospital traffic of the era ran to the state's institutions in sequence as each opened: the Indianapolis hospital first, and Logansport's Longcliff after 1888, on the state's general course; the floor instance for this section, South Bend's build, works the Westville traffic of the later state system whole. No carrier reached counts Liberty Township's committed by name, year or destination, and no commitment case from the town was reached in the reported case law; both items stand as named gaps — the first settled by the St. Joseph County commissioners' and circuit court's commitment records read for Liberty Township, the second by the county's insanity docket. The commitment-law item prints at state-course size: commitment was a court proceeding under Indiana statute throughout, its forms changing as the statutes changed, and no North Liberty-specific proceeding is documented to carry it deeper.