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1869–1907 · South Bend's savings and trust institutions, separated from the commercial banks
Between the national banks and the credit unions stands a stratum the banked row never separated: the savings banks and trust companies. It is dug here as its own layer from Howard (1907), §16, read first-hand.
St. Joseph County Savings Bank. Incorporated November 25, 1869, by Louis Humphreys, John C. Knoblock, Thelus M. Bissell, Joseph Worden, Adam S. Baker, T. Wilkes Defrees, David Greenawalt, Almond Bugbee, William F. Bulla, and John C. Birdsell; opened for business in January 1870, first on the east side of Main Street a little north of Washington, then on the west side nearly opposite, then moved again. Its growth is the stratum's measure: deposits of $7,267.98 in 1870 had become, by 1907, "over three and a quarter millions," with nearly 10,000 depositors and over $1,300,000 paid out in interest. The bank owed its origin principally to Theodore J. Seixas, its secretary and cashier until 1878, succeeded by Lucius G. Tong. Presidents: Louis Humphreys, then George W. Matthews, then (1895) Jacob Woolverton. Officers in 1907: Woolverton, president; Benjamin F. Dunn, vice-president; George U. Bingham, second vice-president; Lucius G. Tong, secretary and treasurer.
St. Joseph Loan and Trust Company. The savings bank's trust companion, organised in 1900 in connection with the Savings Bank, with officers John M. Studebaker Sr., president; Jacob Woolverton, vice-president; George U. Bingham, second vice-president; and Lucius G. Tong, secretary and treasurer — the same Tong who ran the savings bank's desk. Howard's whole verdict on it is one line: it "has since done a most extensive business."
People's Savings Bank. Organised in 1875 by Joseph B. Arnold Jr. and others, Arnold its first president; trustees Hiram Jackson, Newton Jackson, Aaron Webster, Henry B. Hine, George W. Swygart, Andrew J. Jaquith, Joseph B. Arnold Sr., and Joseph B. Arnold Jr. It was "successfully carried on for ten years, when the bank voluntarily closed, paid its depositors in full and retired" — about 1885. It is the stratum's clean ending, and the county record's clearest paid-in-full case (carried into the failure record at art-75-6).
Howard's closing list for 1907 completes the stratum's census: "The remaining banks and trust companies … are: The Citizens' National Bank, the Merchants' National Bank, the American Trust Company and the Citizens' Loan, Trust and Savings Company." No further detail on the two trust companies is given in Howard, and none is invented here. The stratum's end, for this ground, is printed plainly: no savings bank or trust company is seated on Granger ground as of November 2026 — the present row is commercial banks and credit unions only — and none of the 1907 institutions survives under its own name on the corridor. The St. Joseph County Savings Bank's later fate, merger or absorption, was not established in the open sources reached; it stands as a residual want whose settler is the FDIC BankFind institution-history record, and no successor is guessed.