The homecomings

1865 – 1946

1865, at the record's size: The first homecoming is the one this record can document least ceremonially. Howard's county history follows the county's regiments to their musterings-out — the 73rd Indiana mustered out at Nashville on 1 July 1865, the 29th held in Georgia until October 1865 — and the men came home as they had gone, in companies and ones and twos, across the summer and fall. The biographical record preserves one arrival exactly, and it stands for the rest: Lewis T. Stover of Company E, 63rd Indiana, discharged at Raleigh, North Carolina, on 29 October 1865, "returning immediately to South Bend, which place he reached November 3" — a future marshal of the city, home five days off the cars. Of a formal civic reception for the returning regiments, the reachable record carries nothing, and the gap is printed plain. What the city built instead was slower and longer: the regimental reunions whose papers the county's Civil War records preserve at the University of Notre Dame Archives — the 48th Indiana's reunion papers running 1889 to 1913, the 20th Indiana's 1888–96, the 36th's of 1889, the 12th Cavalry's 1897–1920 — and, in the end, the monument and the posts. The homecoming of 1865, in South Bend, became an institution rather than an event.

Armistice, 11 November 1918: The second homecoming began with a noise the whole city made at once. The South Bend News-Times of Monday, 11 November 1918, carried the headline "South Bend Joins All America in Celebration," and its account — read in the paper's own surviving pages — describes the downtown district as a seething mass of humanity, factory whistles sounding, improvised bands, automobiles and every noisemaking contraption the city could assemble, and quotes a celebrant calling it the greatest day in all the history of the world. The next day's paper printed the photograph under the caption "One of the Noise-Making Crowds That Featured South Bend's Celebration of End of the War," and summed the day up in two words of headline: "GREAT HILARITY." The soldiers themselves were still overseas; the city was celebrating the promise of them.

1919, the year of arrivals: The arrivals ran all through the following year, and the News-Times' columns are their register: its issue of 3 January 1919 alone carries the returning soldiers arriving during the week and the sick soldiers home from Camp Sherman, Ohio. The returning men did what the Civil War generation had done — they organized. The American Legion's South Bend posts, carried above, are the homecoming's institutional residue, built in 1919 and the years after by the men who came back; and at Notre Dame the same impulse turned to stone within five years, the cry for a memorial to the university's war having begun, the Archives record, shortly after the armistice. The 1919 homecoming has no single date in this record because it was not a day; it was the year the veterans came home and founded the institutions that have kept their calendar ever since.

1945–46, in the Service Notes: The third homecoming was chronicled in a single newspaper column. During the Second World War the South Bend Tribune began its "Service Notes" — a short column of the county's citizens drafted, entering service, promoted and sent from post to post — and kept it running from 1941 through 1979, across Korea and Vietnam as well; the St. Joseph Public Library's index to the column is the homecoming generation's finding aid. Through 1945 and 1946 the column's notices turned from postings to discharges, and the county's servicemen and women came home by the same channel they had left by, in print, a few lines at a time. Of a V-J Day street celebration in South Bend — the whistles and crowds the News-Times caught whole in 1918 — the reachable record for this section carries no account, and the difference is printed as it stands: the 1918 celebration is documented from its own newspaper; the 1945 one, in the sources open to this record, survives as the column that counted the men home rather than the crowd that greeted them.

Sources:

1. Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, vol. 2 (1907) — the county regiments' musterings-out, the 73rd on 1 July 1865 and the 29th in October 1865; Pictorial and Biographical Memoirs of Elkhart and St. Joseph Counties (Goodspeed, 1893) — Lewis T. Stover's discharge at Raleigh on 29 October 1865 and his reaching South Bend on 3 November.
2. University of Notre Dame Archives, finding aid, Saint Joseph County (Ind.) Civil War Records — the reunion papers of the 48th Indiana (1889–1913), 20th Indiana (1888–96), 36th Indiana (1889) and 12th Indiana Cavalry (1897–1920) among the county's records.
3. South Bend News-Times, 11 and 12 November 1918, and 3 January 1919 (Hoosier State Chronicles) — the armistice headline and celebration account, the photograph caption and "Great Hilarity," and the January 1919 items on soldiers arriving home and the sick from Camp Sherman.
4. St. Joseph County Public Library, Military Service Notes Column Index — the Tribune's "Service Notes" column, 1941–1979, its contents and coverage of the Second World War, Korea and Vietnam.