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THE PLATE RECORD · 1950–2008 AND AFTER
For two generations, every license plate issued across this branch's counters announced its county before its number: St. Joseph County's number in Indiana's county-prefix system is 71 — seventy-first in the alphabetical assignment that runs from Adams County at 1 to Whitley at 92. The number was verified, first-hand, against the State of Indiana's own published list, "Indiana County Numbers and County Names," which prints "71 — St. Joseph"; the Bureau's own branch paperwork still carries the pairing, its February 2021 branch notice listing this branch as "South Bend St. Joseph-71." Within the county, the system knew this branch by its own mark: in the 1999–2003 series, the letter following the county number identified the issuing branch, and the plate references give the example directly — "71 stands for St Joseph and E for South Bend" — so a plate reading 71E was a county-seat issuance, out of this branch's rooms. The sister branches' letters are their own runnings' gaps; the county seat's letter is documented, and it is the letter E.
The course runs in three systems. County designations first appeared on Indiana plates with the 1950 issue, as two-letter codes: the plate-history record gives St. Joseph County's codes as BB through BH, while the ShopLicensePlates county key prints BB–BK and BN for the same county and years. The conflict is printed whole, unharmonized — it is the second of the two conflicts the Osceola audit routed to this running (DF-29), and this running carries it exactly as the sibling runnings carry it, because no record reached adjudicates between the two keys; surviving 1950-issue plates and the Bureau's issuance records are its settlers, named in the closing article. In 1963 the familiar system began — the two-digit county number as the serial's prefix — which ran in spirit long after the serial itself changed: the branch letter after the county number in the 1999–2003 series, and, when the county's volume outgrew the single-letter plan, a two-letter serial format, 71AB123, seen on the 2000 base. The county number left the serial's front in 2008 and survives as a printed county decal on the plate.
The documented size of the county's plate record, at the strength the references support, is a pair of allocation ceilings computed by the plate-history record from the formats themselves: 69,993 plates issuable under the 1950 letter scheme, 239,976 under the 1963 number scheme. These are ceilings, not registrations — the number of St. Joseph County cars actually registered in any year of the system stands in the Secretary of State's and the Bureau's annual reports, which are named as the settling source for the county's first registrations in the closing article. The branch at the county seat took the registrations of one of the state's largest cities and its factory fleets — Studebaker's South Bend — and the allocation that ran to six figures is the scale of what crossed its desks in the plate years.
Principal sources: State of Indiana, "Indiana County Numbers and County Names" (the published county-number list, read first-hand: "71 — St. Joseph"); Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles, branch notice of February 16, 2021 ("South Bend St. Joseph-71"); the plate-history record (1950 and 1963 schemes, allocation ceilings); ShopLicensePlates county key (the conflicting 1950 codes); LicensePlateMania branch-letter record (71E).