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1945 — Epworth becomes Memorial: the succession's first great renaming is an event with a cause, printed in the article above and fixed here as the ledger's first entry: in June 1945 Epworth Hospital and Training School was reincorporated as a community hospital, the Methodist Church's management role ended, and the institution became Memorial Hospital of South Bend — the name it still carries. The renaming ran through the whole plant: its training school became the Memorial Hospital School of Nursing the same year (item 10).
The mental-health making, in its stages: the county's modern mental-health line begins with Madison Center, founded in 1949 in South Bend, a nonprofit providing comprehensive mental-health and substance-abuse services across St. Joseph, Elkhart, LaPorte, Marshall and Porter counties, and for six decades the state's designated community mental health center for St. Joseph County. The stages after it are dated events, not a drift. September 24, 2010: by mutual agreement the state terminated Madison's managed-care contract and Oaklawn Psychiatric Center — founded 1962, Elkhart County's designated center since 1973 — became St. Joseph County's designated community mental health center at 5 p.m. that day, leasing space at Madison so that patients kept the same providers in the same rooms; Madison's inpatient services were expressly unaffected by the change. March 2011: Memorial Hospital purchased Madison Center's inpatient assets — approximately ninety beds — and opened its inpatient psychiatry program for adults and children as the Memorial Epworth Center, in the old Epworth campus at 420 N. Niles Avenue: the Methodist hospital's name, carried onto the mental-health plant the community system had built. Emergency and crisis care for the county runs through that center around the clock (the referral record Indiana University South Bend publishes for its students gives Memorial Epworth's line as the 24-hour access point), and Oaklawn — whose designation Health & Care already points to — remains the county's designated center as of November 2026.
The consolidation of 2026, printed at its November 2026 state — announced, not complete: in October 2026 Beacon Health System announced the consolidation of its whole behavioral-health service line into the Memorial Epworth Center: inpatient services at the Elkhart Center for Behavioral Medicine will transition to Memorial Epworth in South Bend, centralizing the system's behavioral care in the one facility, with completion set for December 1, 2026 — after this build's November check date. The event therefore prints as Beacon's stated decision and timetable, not as a completed fact: as of November 2026 the two-facility footprint still stood, the Elkhart patients had not yet moved, and the register's "consolidation of 2026" is a consolidation in progress whose closing date its own system has published. The line the ledger carries forward is whole: a Methodist hospital of 1894 gives its name, through a 1945 community reincorporation and a 2011 asset purchase, to the single building into which a five-county mental-health system is, this winter, gathering itself.
Sources: Indiana United Methodist heritage record — the June 1945 reincorporation. Madison Center / Oaklawn joint release (September 7, 2010) — Madison founded 1949 and its five-county service; Oaklawn founded 1962, Elkhart's center since 1973; the September 24, 2010 designation transfer, the leased space, inpatient unaffected. Memorial Hospital institutional record — the March 2011 purchase of Madison Center's inpatient assets, approximately ninety beds, the Memorial Epworth Center. Beacon locations record — Memorial Epworth Center, 420 N. Niles Ave. Indiana University South Bend, Student Counseling Center referral page — Memorial Epworth as 24-hour emergency access. ABC57 / Spot On Indiana and Wisevoter's South Bend record (October 2026) — Beacon's behavioral-health consolidation into Memorial Epworth, completion December 1, 2026. Conflict printed: the register's span for Madison Center (1949–2011) marks its inpatient course's end in the 2011 purchase; Madison as an organization and its outpatient course are not closed by any source reached, and are not closed here.