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1918, and the membership record
Around the lodge stand its companion order and a wartime glimpse of the benefit societies. The Order of the Eastern Star's North Liberty chapter, No. 290, is attested in the town's own record — a Palmer Funeral Homes staff biography records its late funeral director Kent R. Palmer as a member of "North Liberty OES #290, Past Patron," alongside his membership in Lodge No. 266 itself. The assessment-insurance alphabet that the discipline sweeps — the tents, hives and camps of the benefit machine — surfaces for this town once in the sources reached, and vividly: the South Bend News-Times of 10 April 1918 (Hoosier State Chronicles) reports a Liberty Loan meeting of the Modern Woodmen of America to be held in North Liberty that night, addressed by Dan Pyle, as the county's lodges were organised to sell the war loan. One meeting is not a camp history; the Woodmen's camp number, charter and course here stand as a named gap, its settlers the order's own records and the town press of the 1900s–20s read whole.