South Bend Veterans: The Posts, the Memorials and the Homecomings

Veterans · The Posts, the Memorials, and the Homecomings

South Bend's veterans organized themselves before the city was a city in any settled sense, and the organization outlasted every war. The Grand Army of the Republic put seven posts into St. Joseph County — two of them in South Bend itself — and ran the county's memory of the Civil War for two generations: its encampments, its Decoration Day parades to the city cemetery, and finally the granite monument on the courthouse square that the whole county taxed itself to raise. When the Grand Army's last posts went dark in the 1930s, the forms it invented did not die with it. The American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars took up the parades, the honor guards, the grave tablets and the lobbying; the county built a service office and, much later, a veterans court; the federal clinic that had served the city from two successive South Bend addresses crossed the line into Mishawaka in a building four times the size of the one it left; and a retired judge in his late eighties founded the city's most distinctive veterans charity out of a newspaper photograph. This section holds that institutional line whole: the posts and their charters, the memorials and their inscriptions, the services and their present state, the homecomings as the record carries them, and the ground where the city's veterans are buried.

Two boundaries are printed once here and held throughout. The wars themselves — the regiments, the battles, the individual service — belong to this history's Wars and War Heroes records; this section takes the veteran after the war, organized and at home. And the institutions seated across the city line in Mishawaka, Notre Dame's included, are named as what they are wherever the county's story runs through them.