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1844 – STATED AT TRUE SIZE
The test is run and the result is thin: the French trading town of the valley — the post, the trader families, the French century on the river — stood on South Bend's ground, and it is told in that city's build. Mishawaka's French presence in the record is real but of a different kind: it arrived as clergy. From 1844 the village was served from Notre Dame by the French-born Edward Sorin and his Congregation of Holy Cross priests — the names the parish record keeps are Sorin's, Francis Cointet's, J. Gouesse's — and the mission's first recorded baptism, Cointet's conditional baptism of the convert Samuel Black in 1848, was administered by a French priest in a town whose Catholic people were becoming, in Sorin's own later words, Irish and German. No French settler community — no cluster of French or French-Canadian families with an institution of their own — stands in any source reached for this build: no French parish, no French society, no French street. The thread is printed at its true size: the language of the first mission, not a founding people of the town.
Sources
- Religion file of this record — the Holy Cross mission from 1844, the serving priests named, and the first baptism of record (1848).
- Alerding, The Diocese of Fort Wayne, 1857–1907 — the St. Joseph's parish sketch: services established by Sorin in 1844, Mass in named homes, the Holy Cross priests in order.
- South Bend file of this record — the valley's French trading town, boundary-printed as South Bend's.