The First Courts, the First Sheriff, and the First Jail — the County Frame Whole

1830–1860 · THE COUNTY'S FIRSTS, BOUNDARY-PRINTED AT THEIR SIZE; MISHAWAKA'S OWN AT THEIRS

The first term: St. Joseph County was formed by act of the General Assembly approved 29 January 1830, its organization effective 1 April 1830, and its Board of Justices assembled on 27 August 1830 at the house of Alexis Coquillard, with L. M. Taylor — elected the county's first clerk and recorder at the first election, on the first Monday of August 1830 — keeping the record. The first term of the circuit court of which there is any record was held on 22 October 1832, by the Hon. John R. Porter, presiding judge, in the bar-room of Calvin Lilly's tavern at South Bend; Daniel A. Fullerton was sheriff and L. M. Taylor clerk, and the attorneys admitted at that term are named in the record — Jonathan A. Liston, Elisha Egbert, A. Ingram, Thomas B. Brown, Wm. M. Jenners and C. K. Greene. The term's first three cases fix the young county's docket in one line: the first case was a divorce suit, and it succeeded; the second was for libel; the third was a criminal case — a woman charged with selling liquor to the Indians, the county's first recorded criminal prosecution. The first probate court sat earlier the same year, on 5 January 1832, before John Banker and Chapel W. Brown, associate judges, at the house of Calvin Lilly. These are the county's firsts, seated at the county seat, and they are printed as the county's: every Mishawaka felony of the century that followed ran through this machinery, as crime-01 states.

The first sheriff: The record names the office's first holders at two points that do not quite join, and both are printed. The 1875 atlas's biographical line gives Samuel L. Cottrell — who came to the county in 1829 — as "appointed sheriff of the county in 1831 and in 1834," the earliest appointment the record carries. The same atlas's court narrative names Daniel A. Fullerton as the sheriff in office at the first recorded circuit term in October 1832. The succession between an 1831 appointee and the sheriff of the 1832 term is not stated in either account, and this section does not invent it: Cottrell holds the first appointment the record names, Fullerton holds the first term, and the county's full sheriffs' succession is the county file's to assemble, with the commissioners' records as its source.

The jail as a building: The county's first jail was built in 1831 — ordered at the commissioners' October 1831 meeting at Coquillard's house and complete by April 1832, a log building: a traveler who saw South Bend in the middle 1830s counted "a small brick courthouse, a log jail" among its buildings. It filled fast enough that in January 1835 the commissioners ordered a second story, doubling its capacity. The courthouse beside it carries a conflict this section prints whole: the commissioners accepted a proposal on 7 February 1832 to build it — at $6,000 in the modern courthouse history drawn on Chapman's pages, at $3,000 in the 1875 atlas's line, which adds that it was commenced in 1832 and finished in 1837; the modern account has it finished enough to accept and use by September 1833, with finishing work running to 1837. The building itself is agreed: forty feet square, brick, at Main and West Washington. The second jail followed in 1860 at $35,000, the same price as the second courthouse of the 1850s. It was the first jail that held the county's first celebrated prisoners — Chapman's counterfeiting ring of crime-02 "boasted they would stay in the old log jail no longer than suited them, and escaped in broad daylight."

Mishawaka's own first officers and lockup: The town's own frame stands in crime-01 and is pointed to, not retold: the village organization of 1835 with its trustees, the constable's authority, the Penn Township justice courts. One first of Mishawaka's own is named in the 1875 atlas's Mishawaka sketch and is carried here: Dr. Fowler, the town's first justice of the peace — the smallest court of the county system sat in Mishawaka from its first years, in his person. No Mishawaka lockup as a building — no town calaboose, no village jail — stands in the record reached for this build: the histories name none, and the county jail at South Bend was the confinement of record for this ground's prisoners, as crime-01's frame states. The gap is named with its settling sources: the Mishawaka City Council Records, 1845–1977, at the Hesburgh Libraries, and the town minute books they continue, are where a town lockup's building, if one was built, would be ordered and paid for. The county's first murder indictment — the third element of this item's checklist — already stands whole in crime-03: Charles Eager, indicted 7 October 1858 for a killing at Mishawaka, and it is pointed to there, not retold.

Sources:

1. Higgins, Belden & Co., An Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1875) — the county's organization, the first circuit term of 22 October 1832 (Porter, J.; Fullerton, sheriff; Taylor, clerk; the divorce, libel and liquor cases), the first probate court of 5 January 1832, the courthouse at $3,000 finished 1837, the first jail built 1831 and the second in 1860 at $35,000, Cottrell "appointed sheriff of the county in 1831 and in 1834," and Dr. Fowler as Mishawaka's first justice of the peace; read first-hand.
2. Indiana University South Bend, African American Landmark Tour, "St. Joseph County Courthouses" (drawing on Chapman, History of St. Joseph County (1880), pp. 364–66, 534–35) — the jail ordered October 1831 and complete by April 1832, the second story ordered January 1835, the courthouse proposal of $6,000 accepted 7 February 1832 and finished enough to use by September 1833.
3. Chas. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana
4. The parent fragment, crime-01 and crime-03 — Mishawaka's 1835 organization and officers, the council-records route to the small-court record, and the Eager indictment of 1858, pointed to here.