Thrift, the Red Cross, and the other purses, at counted size where the record counts

ITEM 3 · THE SMALLER PURSES, AND THE WINTER OF THE WAR

Below the loans ran the war's small-change machinery — thrift stamps, war savings, Red Cross work, food and fuel discipline — and for this town its record is a set of county frames with one seated negative at the center.Thrift ran on the Treasury's rails: the war-savings and thrift campaigns that Greenough's volume pairs with the loans in its very title, sold through post offices, schools, and banks — Walkerton's counters among them — at county totals the volume keeps. The women's registration of 1917, in which Indiana registered its women's war-service capacity on cards the state counted by the tens of thousands, includes this county's women in the state's count; the county card count stands in the state record and is named in the run note as a residue item rather than estimated here. Food and fuel discipline — the garden campaigns, the meatless and wheatless observances, and the fuel winter of 1917–18, when the coal shortage closed schools and shortened hours across Indiana in the war's hardest home-front season — reached Lincoln Township's farm households as state and county administration, documented at that grain. What the branch cannot do is count Walkerton's own gardens, stamps, or bandages: the town paper's war-work columns are where those counts live, and they stand with this section's other residue behind the same settler — the Independent's 1917–19 file, named in the run note.

Principal sources: Greenough (1922), the thrift and war-savings campaigns and the women's-committee record; this history (the Red Cross chapter test, negative for this ground); South Bend News-Times, April 1918 (the county's auxiliary work in progress).