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1868–1876 AND THE NAME'S LONG SHADOW · 117–119 WEST COLFAX, SOUTH BEND (BOUNDARY)
Boundary — South Bend, where this ground's only true same-name problem lives: the checklist asks for one address through all its names and for the first and second houses of one name distinguished, and South Bend supplies the pair in a single building. The Second St. Joseph Hotel, 117–119 West Colfax Avenue, was built by a Pennsylvanian named David Greenawalt and opened on 10 September 1868; it worked as a hotel until 1876, changed hands frequently, stood empty for four years, and was then leased by Marvin Campbell — later of the Campbell Box & Tag Company — for a hardware store, the first of the commercial uses that carried the building down to the present. It is, on the National Register nomination's evidence, the oldest extant commercial building in South Bend and the second-oldest building downtown, the only older one being the 1854 courthouse; it was listed on the Register on 5 June 1985 (reference 85001227). The name is the succession: a building that opens in 1868 calling itself the Second St. Joseph Hotel testifies that a First St. Joseph Hotel stood before it in the city's trade — and the First is where this article stops digging and names its gap, because the open record reached gives the Second whole and the First by implication only. NAMED GAP: the First St. Joseph Hotel — its dates, site and end; settler: Howard's 1907 hotels chapter read at page strength and the South Bend directory runs, neither reached at that strength. Osceola's share of the succession article is categorical: no address in the town carries a name succession of any kind, because no address in the town has carried a hotel under even one name (art-69-5).
Sources: National Register nomination, Second St. Joseph Hotel (Downtown South Bend MRA, 1985); Building South Bend (University of Notre Dame), property record ND-SB-00233; Howard (1907), named as settler for the First.