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Howard's military chapter, read whole, carries the county's soldier record war by war — and between the wars, almost nothing stands. The chapter's one standing body of the militia years is the company already banked: the minute-men raised under Israel Dayton's call in the Black Hawk summer of 1832, seated at South Bend and Portage Prairie. No standing militia company seated in St. Joseph County between that summer and the Civil War is named in Howard, and none seated in the county in the Legion years after it except at the county seat. The state frame agrees, and dates the structure: under Indiana's militia revision of 10 February 1831, with every able man of 18 to 45 enrolled, St. Joseph County stood in the Twentieth Brigade, brigaded with Tippecanoe, Clinton, Carroll, Cass and Elkhart counties; and when the Indiana Legion — the Guard's direct ancestor — was organized by regiments in 1882, the county's company in the First Regiment was Company B, of South Bend, with Company G at Elkhart the nearest company east.
Lincoln Township's share of the militia years is none, and the dates explain it. Settlement on this ground began in 1835, but Lincoln Township was not formed until 7 June 1866 — after the militia system's working life was already closing — and neither Howard's chapter nor Pratt's History of the National Guard of Indiana (1901), the state's own organizational record, names a militia, Legion or Guard company seated in Lincoln Township or Walkerton at any year. The township's soldier record in the militia years is the banked one: quotas answered and men mustered from the farms, under companies organized at the county seat. The standing company was always South Bend's; this ground sent men to it, and kept no company of its own.
Sources: Howard (1907), History of St. Joseph County, ch.