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1913–1928
For the first motorists of the county seat, there was no branch to go to: Indiana began issuing state license plates in 1913, and the transaction ran by mail. The owner sent his application to the Secretary of State in Indianapolis and waited for the plates to come back — a wait long enough, and uncertain enough, that when the Hoosier State Automobile Association planned its local service branches in 1921, the Kokomo Tribune explained the appeal in exactly those terms: a branch keeping plates on hand meant "the car owner would not have to send his application [to] the Indiana Secretary of State and then wait an indefinite period for their arrival." South Bend's own directory of that year, the Polk directory of 1921, carries the negative in its small way: read, it lists no license bureau, no automobile license office, no state counter of the kind — the county seat's licensing in 1921 was a mailbox in Indianapolis, and the directory's silence is the texture of it.
The machinery professionalized through the 1920s under the Secretary of State's automobile department. By August 1923 roughly 240,000 of the 1924 plates had already been manufactured — made at Newport, Kentucky — and shipped out to "branches of the automobile department in various parts of the state," to be held until the sale opened in December; H. D. McClelland, the department's manager, gave the figures to the press. Branch offices, in other words, existed as the department's distribution points by the early 1920s, seated where the department seated them. Where the system's first fixed counter for this county stood, and in what year the county seat's branch opened as a standing office, is not settled by the record reached; the Tribune's files of the 1920s and the department's own reports are the named settlers, and the item stands in the closing article. Whether the automobile association's plate-issuing service ever operated a counter in St. Joseph County is likewise unsettled and likewise carried.
The other channel was the notary's desk, and the state's own words mark its limits. In December 1928 Mark W. Rhoads, director of the automobile license department in the Secretary of State's office, "strongly advised Indiana automobile owners to obtain their 1929 plates early" and "urged further that application be made at the official license branch offices and not from this or that person who may wish to act as a notary," because "the loss of titles, mistakes in titles, and mistakes in information required for records" made the official branches, "where trained help is maintained," essential. The warning only makes sense against a countryside full of intermediaries — notaries, dealers, garagemen — taking plate applications as a sideline; in a city with South Bend's dealer row, the sideline desks stood ready-made along Michigan Street, though no one desk is named in the record reached as the city's, and none is printed as such.
Rhoads, December 1928, as carried in the press of record; Polk's South Bend city directory, 1921 (read whole for the license listings; none stands).