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ITEM 2 · THE WAR PURSE OF INDIANA (1922), READ FOR THIS COUNTY
The five Liberty Loans were organized, quota'd, and reported by county, and the state's own history of its war purse prints St. Joseph County's Third Loan whole — a county that nearly failed, and then did not. The Third Liberty Loan (spring 1918): St. Joseph County's allotment was $2,500,000, under county chairman Arthur D. Baker. A week before the close the county "had been causing the state officials not a little worry," having subscribed only 48 percent of its allotment; after a big Liberty Loan meeting of the South Bend Rotary Club on May 1, the county "took its place among the 'white' counties" — the state's map language for a county over the top — and closed at $2,688,000 subscribed, 107 percent of quota. The women's organization worked inside the same drive as a counted purse of its own: the county's women's committee, chaired by Mrs. Victor F. Jones, carried a quota of $625,000 and sold $341,900 in the Third Loan, its chairman telling the press mid-drive that "the women of St. Joseph county are certainly working very faithfully on this Liberty loan campaign," with fourteen-minute speakers out across the county and the smaller bonds moving household by household. Walkerton's subscriptions are inside these county totals — the Treasury kept no town column, and this branch prints none — but the town's two banks (both still standing in 1918; they fall in 1930, in the Banks leg) were the loan's local counters, and its households the loan's local subscribers, at exactly the county strength the record gives. The remaining drives — First and Second (1917), Fourth (autumn 1918, closing October 19 with Indiana over its quota), and the Victory Loan (1919) — stand in Greenough's county tables at the same grain; this run read the Third whole and names the volume's per-drive county tables as the settler for the full five-drive course, printed in the run note as this item's residue rather than borrowed at extract strength.
Principal sources: Walter Sidney Greenough, The War Purse of Indiana (Indiana Historical Commission, 1922) — the Third Loan narrative and the county quota table (St. Joseph: quota $2,500,000, subscription $2,688,000, 107 percent; chairman Arthur D. Baker) and the women's Third Loan record (Mrs. Victor F. Jones; quota $625,000; $341,900); South Bend News-Times, April 12 and October 20, 1918 (Hoosier State Chronicles).