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1851–1907
Penn Township's share of the county fair begins at the society's head table. When the St. Joseph County Agricultural Society was reorganized at the courthouse on Saturday, April 19, 1851, the chairman of the meeting was George C. Merrifield of Penn Township — the fact stands in the society's minutes as Chapman printed them in 1880, and Howard, repeating Chapman and citing him, is the same single witness, not a second one. The officers chosen on January 3, 1852 kept a Penn man on the board: Powers Greene took the presidency and G. C. Merrifield sat as the Penn director. The township's names recur as the society's course runs. At the reorganization of March 15, 1858 — under the state act of February 17, 1852 for the encouragement of agriculture — the secretary chosen was Milton W. Stokes, and Merrifield again sat among the directors. Stokes is Osceola's own: the proprietor who the next year, on June 4, 1859, platted Stokes's Addition on the town's section-16 ground, the second of the two additions the modern town stands on. The man who kept the fair society's minutes in 1858 was, in the same years, platting the town this build is about.
When the old society's successor formed on February 3, 1881 — the Northern Indiana Agricultural Society, organized to hold fairs on the county grounds between South Bend and Mishawaka — its incorporators were named township by township, and Penn's contingent was the largest rural bloc on the list: J. H. Eberhart, Aaron Jones, Charles G. Towle, C. L. Stiles, Henry Studebaker, John R. Shank, W. W. Butterworth, Edward A. Jernegan, J. M. Wommer, Joseph Miller, F. R. Eberhart and A. Eberhart — twelve men of this township among the fifty-odd incorporators. When the society was revived under its old name on March 31, 1899, Charles G. Towle of Penn headed the incorporators again; the end came on June 4, 1903, when the society surrendered the county grounds, which passed on April 3, 1906 to the city of South Bend as Potawatomi Park. Those grounds stood in section 7, township 37 north, range 3 east — South Bend ground, bought by the commissioners' order of April 20, 1881 — and the society's story whole is printed where its owners printed it; what is Osceola's is the township's repeated presence in the leadership, across fifty years, of the institution that ran the fair.
The same Penn name carries the township's share into the farmers' orders. Howard's fifth section of the fairs chapter treats the Grange: the St. Joseph Valley Grange, No. 584, "has been most successful from the beginning," and in the person of Aaron Jones — the same Penn Township incorporator of 1881 — "the local organization has frequently furnished the master for the Indiana State Grange; and for several years Mr. Jones was the most efficient master of the National Grange." A farmer of this township rose to head the national farmers' order; Howard prints it as the county's pride, and it is recorded here as Penn's. Jones also stands among the incorporators of the Farmers' Mutual Fire Insurance Company of St. Joseph County, organized August 25, 1877 — the farmers' mutual that insured the county's farms at cost. The county's yearly Farmers' Institutes, a week of Purdue lecturers each fall or winter, complete Howard's chapter; they were county occasions, seated in the cities, and no institute seated in Osceola is named in the record reached.
Principal sources: Howard (1907), vol. 1, ch. VII §§1, 4, 5 (transcription at the LDS Genealogy mirror; the archive.org page images settle any contested reading); Chapman (1880), ch. XIII — the society's minutes, one witness for the 1851–52 frame, as the Mishawaka running established.