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1861
The record opens with a meeting, not a muster roll: Indiana law enrolled the able-bodied men of every county in the militia, and St. Joseph County's pioneers lived under that framework from the county's organization — but the county histories carry no named pioneer-era company for this ground, no Mexican War company, and no militia episode of the 1830s–50s that is the county's own. The militia story the record actually holds begins with the Civil War. On 15 April 1861, three days after Fort Sumter, a mass meeting filled the courthouse at South Bend, and the county began raising companies. On 23 April 1861 the older men organized themselves: a home-guard company of citizens over forty-five, under Captain S. L. Cottrell, which paraded in the streets and saluted the Elkhart Volunteers at the depot as they left for the war. The home guard is the pioneer militia tradition in its last form — the enrolled county defending the home ground while its young men went — and it is the first military organization of this place that the record names.
Sources:
- Chapman, History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), ch. VI, "St. Joseph County in the War" — the 15 April 1861 courthouse meeting, the home-guard company of men over 45 organized 23 April 1861 under Capt. S. L. Cottrell, and the depot salute to the Elkhart Volunteers; read first-hand from the digitized text (archive.org, historyofstjosep00chap). The same volume's general Indiana chapters treat the militia of other counties; no pioneer-era company of St. Joseph County is carried in them.