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Once, seriously and in public, South Bend tried to swallow this place whole. The attempt is the best-documented episode in the place's civic non-existence, and it is told here at the size the verified record supports — who proposed it, what was sought, how it ended — and no larger.
The proposal was Mayor Lloyd M. Allen's. Notre Dame Magazine's town-and-gown history, the fullest verified account returned for this wave, records that South Bend sought to annex nearly 2,000 acres of land including not only the Notre Dame campus but the Saint Mary's and Holy Cross campuses as well, and that the annexation effort was begun in 1969 by then-Mayor Allen, "whose ambition to acquire Notre Dame was initially thwarted by council members opposed to the annexation ordinance." The motive was stated without embarrassment at the time and repeated by former Mayor Roger O. Parent in the same account: if the colleges were inside the city, the city could count the students as part of its population and benefit financially under the rules for distributing state and federal funds — annexation as a census play, the mirror image of the group-quarters arithmetic in this section's first article. The contemporary campus paper fills in the ordinance's shape as it was filed with the city clerk in March 1969 and sent to the council's annexation committee and the area plan commission: some 1,110.5 acres of Notre Dame property and 747 acres of Saint Mary's, bounded roughly by the Toll Road country on the north, Angela Boulevard on the south, Juniper Road on the east and U.S. 31 on the west (the acreage figures differ slightly between the contemporary paper and the magazine's "nearly 2,000 acres" for all three campuses — both are printed, the difference being scope, not error). The wire-service report of the same week put the ask at the council's March 1969 meeting as the 1,119-acre campus of Notre Dame and the 478-acre campus of Saint Mary's — a third set of figures, from the Associated Press as carried in Indiana papers, printed here as a third reading of an acreage no two accounts state identically. President Theodore M. Hesburgh, in the AP account, thought the city should delay action until officials of the city and the universities could examine the merits; the boards of both schools held authority to act against it.
It ended in a vote. The pressure to annex, the magazine records, grew stronger through 1970, when the new census showed South Bend's population had fallen by more than 7 percent — the city faced losing on the order of $150,000 in state funding unless it found population somewhere, and the students across Angela Boulevard were the nearest population there was. The question came to a head at a public hearing in January 1971, where the Common Council voted 6–3 against the proposal, with the university's executive vice president, the Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, C.S.C., stating plainly in that session that a vote for annexation would be legally contested by Notre Dame. The campuses were not annexed. No later campaign of that kind appears in the sources read for this wave, and the ordinance route of 1969–71 stands in this record as the annexation attempt against the place.
What has happened since is annexation of the opposite kind — by consent, at the edges, for development. In November 2006 the South Bend Common Council passed Ordinance 9713-06, a voluntary annexation, on the petition of 100 percent of the landowners, bringing about 26.20 acres of university-owned land in Portage and Clay townships — east of Eddy Street, west of Ivy Road, south of and including the realigned Edison Road — inside the city limits. That ground is the Eddy Street Commons country: university land the university itself asked to have annexed, so that a planned mixed-use development could proceed as a city project. Smaller owner-petitioned annexations of campus-edge parcels followed the same pattern (the 2008 fiscal-plan papers for Ivy Road parcels north of campus are in the city's records in the sources returned). The distinction is the whole story: the city has never taken a foot of the campuses against the institutions' will, and the institutions have themselves handed over specific development parcels when a project wanted city services and city zoning. And one standing caution belongs to the record: piecemeal annexations of this kind mean the CDP's southern fringe and the city line do not coincide exactly everywhere along Angela and Edison — the statistical boundary and the municipal boundary are different instruments, drawn by different hands for different purposes.
The standing fact, as of November 2026, closes the article and the section: Notre Dame has never been annexed and has never been incorporated. It remains what it was when the post office arrived in 1851 and what the census found it in 2020 — an unincorporated place, in Clay and Portage townships, St. Joseph County, Indiana, governed by the patchwork the services article counted, named by a university, and counted by a Census Bureau that draws its boundary precisely because no one else has ever drawn one in law.
Sources: Notre Dame Magazine, "New Horizons" (town-and-gown history: nearly 2,000 acres including all three campuses; effort begun 1969 by Mayor Lloyd M. Allen; council members initially opposed; Roger O. Parent on the population-and-funding motive; 1970 census decline of more than 7 percent and about $150,000 in state funding at stake; January 1971 public hearing, council vote 6–3 against; Rev. Edmund P. Joyce on legal contest). The Observer, Notre Dame, 21 and 25 Mar. 1969 (ordinances filed; 1,110.5 acres of Notre Dame property and 747 acres of Saint Mary's; boundaries as described; referral to annexation committee and area plan commission). Associated Press report, 24 Mar. 1969, as carried in the Ball State Daily News (council to be asked to annex the 1,119-acre Notre Dame campus and 478-acre Saint Mary's campus; Mayor Allen's revenue-and-growth rationale; Hesburgh urging delay). City of South Bend Ordinance 9713-06, passed 13 Nov. 2006 (voluntary annexation, 100% owner petition, about 26.20 acres, Eddy/Ivy/Edison, University of Notre Dame du Lac petitioner).