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1841–1842 · the road to the lakes
The college began as a refusal. Célestin de la Hailandière, Bishop of Vincennes, had asked Father Basil Moreau, founder of the Congregation of Holy Cross at Le Mans, for a mission band as early as 1839. Sorin's party — the Scholastic's 1893 sketch names seven brothers who sailed with him in August 1841: Francis Xavier, Gatien, Patrick, William, Pierre, Basil, and Vincent; the headnote to his collected papers in the University Archives counts six brothers on the crossing, and the counts are printed here as the carriers give them — landed at New York on 13 September 1841, the eve of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, and reached Vincennes the second Sunday of October by way of the Erie Canal, Lake Erie, Toledo, and the roads and canals through Fort Wayne, Logansport, and Lafayette. The bishop settled them at St. Peter's in Daviess County, some twenty-seven miles east of Vincennes: 160 acres, a little frame church, and a schoolteacher named Rother who was the first man in America to join the order. Twelve men received the habit there within the year.
Sorin asked for a college at St. Peter's, and Hailandière refused — a Catholic college already stood at Vincennes. What the bishop offered instead was the northern tract: a section of land on the St. Joseph River near Lake Michigan, with leave to build a college there provided they accomplished it within two years. The offer's surviving paper is the bishop's letter of 15 November 1842, quoted in the jubilee history: it enclosed $310 and a letter of credit on Alexis Coquillard for $231.12½, noted that "the tax for this year on the land du Lac (Notre Dame du Lac) has not been paid," and invoked the dead of the earlier mission — Badin, De Seille, and "our dear Benjamin" Petit — as the cornerstone of the new foundation. The condition and the clock were the same instrument: build a college on the lakes within two years, or the gift failed.
- A Brief History of the University of Notre Dame du Lac (1895)
- University of Notre Dame Archives, Sorin sketch, 1893; Edward Sorin Papers, finding aid
- Congregation of Holy Cross, United States Province, history of Father Sorin