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1940–1956 EDITIONS · ST. JOSEPH COUNTY
Who could not register is tested here in the instrument built for the question: the Negro Motorist Green Book, read for this ground across the editions openly available — 1940, 1949, the Smithsonian-transcribed edition, and the Fall 1956 edition (New York Public Library / Schomburg). The Indiana lodging listings in those editions stand in Anderson, Angola (Fox Lake Resort), Elkhart, Evansville, French Lick, Gary, Indianapolis, Jeffersonville, Kokomo, Marion, Michigan City, Muncie, New Albany and Terre Haute. For St. Joseph County the book's whole offering, in every edition read, is a restaurant and never a bed: South Bend appears only with Smoke's Place, 492 Chapin Street (1940 edition), carried in the later editions as "Smokes," 432 S. Chapin Street — the address variants printed as the editions give them, not reconciled. There is no Osceola listing, no Mishawaka listing, no State Road 933 listing, and no hotel, tourist home or motel anywhere in the county in the editions read; the nearest Green Book bed to this town in those editions is Elkhart's tourist home of Miss E. Botts, 336 St. Joe Street. The absence is printed as absence, with the editions named, because that is what a Green Book absence meant on the road: a Black traveller crossing Penn Township on the Lincoln Highway in those years had, on the book's evidence, nowhere in the county to sleep that the book could vouch for — and the town at the centre of this build never appears in the book at all, in any category. (The Chapin Street restaurant's own record belongs to the Black History addendum's commercial-district account, art-68-9; the desk test is this section's, and the cross-point is assembly's to make.)
Sources: The Negro Motorist Green Book, editions of 1940 (archive.org full text), 1949 (archive.org), the Smithsonian Transcription Center edition, and Fall 1956 (NYPL / Schomburg), Indiana pages read November 2026.