The dry years in Penn Township

1918–1933 · PROHIBITION-ERA PENN TOWNSHIP

Indiana went dry before the nation did, its statewide prohibition law taking effect in April 1918, ahead of the federal amendment's January 1920 start and running to the national repeal of December 1933 — and for those fifteen years the legal map of Osceola ground changed without its policing map changing at all: the township's stills and blind tigers, if it had them, were the sheriff's and the federal prohibition agents' to raid, and its liquor cases ran to the county's courts like everything else. The county's dry-years record at full depth — the bootlegging economy that supplied South Bend's speakeasies, and the seized-liquor resale scandal in which confiscated liquor in official custody was sold back into the trade, the reselling official named in the county's record — is the county build's to tell whole, and it stands carried in this section's closing article as a named item with its settler, the Tribune's archive for 1918–1933.

For Penn Township itself, the test this build ran is printed with its result: searches of the open press record and the digitized newspaper collections for a still, a speakeasy, a raid, or a liquor prosecution seated in Osceola or Penn Township across the dry years returned nothing seated here. The finds that surface under the township's and the town's names belong to other grounds — the 1921 raid on the Kosparak farm, "northeast of Mishawaka," is the Mishawaka build's record and is not claimed for this ground — and no Osceola name stands in the federal prohibition record reached. The township's dry-years page, at the strength reached, is therefore blank, and it is printed blank rather than furnished with atmosphere: a farm township of orchards and river bottoms between two thirsty cities may have run liquor, and the record reached does not say so. The Tribune archive for the dry years, read for the township by name, is the settler named for any stronger statement either way.