The First Winter and the First Buildings

1842–1844 · survival and construction

The winter of 1842–43 was, in the jubilee history's phrase, one of the coldest in a record the book dates to 1607, with snow fifteen inches deep as far south as Georgia. The community Sorin had planted consisted of some twenty Catholic families within a six-mile radius and a remnant of about 200 Potawatomi, away hunting until the new year; South Bend a mile and a half south was a village of about 1,000, Mishawaka's St. Joseph Iron Works about the same, and the only other Catholic church within reach was the little brick one at Bertrand, six miles below in Michigan. There was no resident pastor between Notre Dame and the missionary who came from Chicago, eighty-six miles away. Local alarm at the newcomers is part of the documented record and is printed at its true size: in the neighborhood telling the seven brothers became "twenty monks out at the Lake," and the Pope of Rome had already sent Father Sorin $90,000 — against actual cash of less than $1,500.

Building went forward in the order need dictated. Brother Vincent's remainder of the St. Peter's colony crossed the frozen swamps to reach Notre Dame in February 1843. A larger log church, twenty by forty-six feet, was opened for service on 19 March 1843, the feast of St. Joseph, at a cost of $200 from the treasury; its second story was fitted as the expected sisters' residence, the old chapel's upper room became the brothers' dormitory, and the log church served until 1848 — it was accidentally burned in 1856, and an iron cross marks its site. The college itself nearly failed at the drafting table: a plan had been prepared at St. Peter's for an H-shaped "double hammer" of forty by 160 feet and four and a half stories, with 60,000 feet of lumber and 250,000 bricks engaged, but the bishop's architect defaulted and the season passed. In its place the community built a brick building at the edge of St. Mary's Lake, part college and part bakery — the "Farm House," which the jubilee history calls the original college building of Notre Dame; it stands today as Old College, in the university's own description the only original landmark on the campus. The first student, in the jubilee history's own telling, was the boy who had led Sorin through the woods from South Bend to the lake on 26 November 1842: Alexis Coquillard, afterwards the wealthy wagon maker of South Bend — the attribution is the 1895 history's, and it is printed as such. The college's first public mention came in the Metropolitan Catholic Almanac for 1843: "Southbend, near Washington, Ind., under direction of Rev. E. Sorin," terms $18 per quarter for tuition, board, washing, and mending.

1. A Brief History of the University of Notre Dame du Lac (1895)
2. University of Notre Dame, campus history and tour record, Old College
3. Metropolitan Catholic Almanac, 1843