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Howard (1907), Pt. 46; Farm News of St. Joseph County, June 1953 (Michiana Memory); Purdue Extension Annual Report, 1932
The county's farm organisations formed early, and one of them predates its own state body. The Farmers' Mutual Fire Insurance Company of St. Joseph County organised on 25 August 1877, its incorporators named in Howard — Samuel Bowman, Aaron Jones, William D. Rockhill, George H. Stover of Centre Township and Thomas B. Chalfant among them — the farm community insuring itself a generation before the town existed. The Grange stood in the county as St. Joseph Valley Grange No. 584, "most successful from the beginning," with Pomona Grange No. 31 above it (its officers about 1907: L. P. Robertson, master; Maud Gray, secretary; Mrs. Samuel Bowman, treasurer); both founding dates stand as gaps. Farmers' Institutes ran yearly, a full week, by 1907 — founding date likewise a gap. The St. Joseph County Horticultural Society formed on 9 November 1892. The Farm Bureau line is corroborated whole: twenty-two farmers met on 14 October 1911 to organise, and the incorporation step followed in March 1913 — six years before the Indiana Farm Bureau itself was founded, on 25 March 1919 at Indianapolis, so the county body is the elder on either telling. Who served first as county agent divides its carriers: the Farm News of 1953 gives John S. Bordner serving from 1911 to 1918, while Purdue's 1932 report has him "appointed in St. Joseph County April 1, 1913," ahead of the act's own effective date — the pair prints whole in the register (C34) and neither is smoothed here.