The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1907 · South Bend (boundary); the mechanism explained once
The mechanism, once, as the row directs. The assessment orders sold insurance as brotherhood: a member's local tent, hive, or camp collected small dues and, at a brother's death, levied an assessment on every member to pay the widow's benefit — pay-as-you-go mutual aid, cheap while the membership was young, and reformed across the industry in the early 1900s into graded, age-based rates as the assessments climbed. The local unit names are the machine's geography: a tent for the Maccabees, a hive for their women's line, a camp for the Woodmen. Howard's 1907 South Bend roster seats the machine in triplicate: South Bend Tent No. 1, Knights of the Maccabees; Pixley Division No. 2, Uniform Rank, Knights of the Maccabees; and the rival Modern Maccabees' St. Joe Valley Tent No. 1108 — two Maccabee orders in one city, each with its tent numbered. The Woodmen camp of the floor pattern does not stand in Howard's reached sections, and is printed as not found there rather than supplied. No tent, hive, or camp of any assessment order seats in Osceola or Penn Township in the record reached; the state insurance reports and the orders' own records are the settling sources if the sweep is ever to be run beyond Howard.
Sources: Howard (1907), vol. 1, Part 73 record for the three Maccabee bodies.