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1922–1953 AND THE TEST RUN NOVEMBER 2026 · ST. JOSEPH COUNTY, WITH PENN TOWNSHIP'S TEST PRINTED WHOLE
Boundary — the federal writing first: the Home Owners' Loan Corporation's City Survey programme, run from 1935 for cities over 40,000, surveyed "South Bend and Mishawaka" as one field (the records stand at the National Archives, Record Group 195, and in the University of Richmond's Mapping Inequality project), and its area descriptions say in the survey's own words what the grades meant: Harter Heights was favoured for the "lack of Negros or other infiltration"; the Beck's Lake area, graded D-5, was described by its "Negro laboring class"; Linden Place stands at D-6. The named developer who worked the line is named in the survey record itself: A. C. Colpaert, a South Bend developer who helped prepare the ratings that then governed the credit his own industry sold into. The Federal Housing Administration's 1936 Underwriting Manual, paragraph 284(2), supplied the doctrine the survey applied. The county's covenants, counted: the Reparatory Justice Commission's housing subcommittee counted 68 St. Joseph County plats filed between 1922 and 1953 carrying racially restrictive covenants — the busiest filing year was 1947, and twelve covenant plats were approved even after Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) made the covenants unenforceable in court. The specimen of record is the Jefferson Park Addition plat of 1923 (record P1923028); its cursive covenant wording could not be read from the filed report's text layer, and the settler is named rather than the wording guessed: the plat record itself, at the County Recorder. In Mishawaka — Penn Township's own city, and therefore this article's nearest ground — the Tribune reported in 2002 that the deeds of Normain Heights, the World War II veterans' subdivision listed on the National Register on 20 March 2002, contain Caucasian-only covenants; the reporting reached quotes no deed's wording, and none is reconstructed here. the town's plats are the banked neighbourhoods fragment's census — 1837-to-postwar additions across 1,388 parcels — and that instrument reads plat descriptions, not covenants. This pass searched the open record for covenant text, a covenant reference or a reported covenant from any Osceola or Penn Township plat: none was reached — not in the Commission's county count as published (its 68 are not itemised to township in the open record), not in the Tribune reporting reached, and not in any openly indexed deed or plat record for the town. The test therefore closes as a named gap at full honesty about its strength: the absence is of the open record, and the covenants of a small town's plats are precisely the class of document that sits in plat books, not on the open web. NAMED GAP: the covenant test at deed strength for Osceola's and Penn Township's plats; settler: the St. Joseph County Recorder's plat books and subdivision covenant records for the town's and township's plats.
Sources: HOLC City Survey records for South Bend and Mishawaka (NARA RG 195; Mapping Inequality, University of Richmond); FHA Underwriting Manual (1936), ¶284(2); South Bend Reparatory Justice Commission, Final Report (2026), housing chapters; South Bend Tribune, Normain Heights covenant reporting (2002); banked neighbourhoods fragment; covenant searches run November 2026 as printed.