The Charter and the College's First Decade

1843–1853 · the condition met

The college was built in a single season. The architect arrived unexpectedly on 24 August 1843; Father Marivault offered $1,200 due him from his family in France, and the South Bend merchant Samuel Byerley — whose family Sorin had met in New York in 1841 and who remained lifelong friends of the house — offered $2,000 of credit on his store and a $500 loan. The cornerstone was laid on 28 August 1843, the feast of St. Augustine; the walls were up and under cover by 20 December through a balmy late autumn, and the rooms were occupied in early June 1844. The building was four stories, eighty by thirty-six feet — the middle bar, the "handle," of the planned double hammer. On the island between the two lakes, originally surveyed as one, the novitiate rose on the same discipline: its chapel's cornerstone was blessed in May 1844, the walls went up in seven and a half days in November, and chapel and novitiate were blessed on 8 December 1844, the feast of the Immaculate Conception — the bishop's contract of donation had required the novitiate as well as the college within the term.

The charter beat the deadline by a year. "An Act to Incorporate the University of Notre Dame du Lac at South Bend in St. Joseph County, Indiana" was enacted on 15 January 1844; its text, as the university publishes it, names as corporators Edward Frederick Sorin, Francis Lewis Cointet, Theophilus Jerome Marivault, and Francis Gouesse, "and their associates and successors in office," constituted "a body corporate and politic, by the name and style of the University of Notre Dame du Lac," with perpetual succession and "full power and authority to confer and grant... such degrees and diplomas in the liberal arts and sciences, and in law and medicine, as are usually conferred." The act was carried in the legislature by South Bend's own senator, John DeFrees, and the two-year condition of Hailandière's gift stood satisfied. The Manual Labor School was chartered the same year through the same hand: boys taught carpenter's, cabinet, blacksmith's, shoemaker's, tailor's, bricklaying, gardening, and farming trades alongside a good English education. Annual classes ran from September 1844. The first catalogue appeared in 1848, printed in Detroit, with commencement on the fourth of July and a premium to Thomas Lafontaine, son of the Miami chief; the first graduate was Neal H. Gillespie, Bachelor of Arts in 1849, later ordained at Rome and a vice-president of the university. The second catalogue, for 1850, was printed in South Bend by "S. Colfax" — Schuyler Colfax, Notre Dame's fast friend, whose prospectus of 1 January 1850 counted fifty-six students besides thirteen in theology. The railroad reached South Bend in 1851 and students came more readily, especially from Chicago; Notre Dame's own post office dates to 1851, obtained, the history records, through Henry Clay's interposition. In 1853 the two wings, each forty by sixty feet, completed the double hammer at last.

The decade's poverty is documented, not embroidered. "On several occasions," the jubilee history states, "Notre Dame was on the point of being sold for debt. One day the farm horses were taken out of the stables and sold by a creditor. Another time there was not a morsel of food in the house." The college carried no fire insurance until 1848, and then only $3,000; the 1844 building's furnace failed and wood stoves served until steam heat came in 1863. That the institution survived its first decade at all is the finding the record supports.

1. Charter of the University of Notre Dame, enacted 15 January 1844, as published by the University (amended 1845, 1873, 1937)
2. A Brief History of the University of Notre Dame du Lac (1895)
3. University of Notre Dame Archives, Sorin sketch, 1893