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1864 – 1865
The county's war ended as it began, with companies raised for the emergency of the season: The 138th Indiana was a hundred-days regiment of 1864, mustered into service on 27 May 1864 under Colonel James H. Shannon, with Company H of St. Joseph County; its men did the guard and garrison duty for which the hundred-days regiments were raised, freeing the three-years regiments for the field, and the regiment was mustered out on 30 September 1864. The 155th Indiana was the war's last regiment: a one-year organization, raised in the war's final spring. Its Company I was composed principally of St. Joseph County men, under Captain Calvin R. Stillson, and other county men joined its other companies. The regiment was organized at Indianapolis on 18 April 1865 — nine days after Appomattox — under Colonel John M. Wilson, and went to duty at Alexandria, Virginia, and at Dover and Centreville and Wilmington, Delaware, and Salisbury, Maryland. Its only loss was Francis Sauls, who died at Indianapolis on 6 May 1865. The regiment mustered out at Dover, Delaware, on 4 August 1865 and came home to a public welcome in the State House Grove at Indianapolis, addressed by Lieutenant Governor Baker and General Benjamin Harrison. A regiment that lost one man, and he to sickness before it left the state, is the measure of how the county's war ended: the 155th's companies guarded railroads and posts in a war already won, and brought everybody home.
Sources:
- Chapman, History of St. Joseph County (1880), ch. VII, pp. 437–439 — the 138th's muster, Company H and muster-out; the 155th's Company I, Stillson, the regiment's duty stations, Sauls's death, and the Indianapolis welcome.