The Pioneer Stock — the Navarre Cabin and What Survives of the First City

1820 – present

The cabin: The oldest building in South Bend is a fur trader's log house. Pierre Freischutz Navarre, an agent of John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company who came from Monroe, Michigan, built his cabin and trading post in 1820 on the north bank of the St. Joseph River, at what is now 123 West North Shore Drive, sited for the river, the Kankakee and the portage between them. Navarre — cited by The History Museum as the first European-descended settler in St. Joseph County, who married Kechoueckquay, a Potawatomi woman — was still recorded as living in the cabin in Father Sorin's parish census of 1850. He died in 1864, and his land passed to Samuel Leeper. Many of the cabin's timbers are from its original construction; its windows and roof have been repaired and replaced across two centuries.

Four moves: The cabin has survived by being carried. When the builders of Navarre Place bought the property from Leeper's heirs for residential development, they donated the cabin to the Northern Indiana Historical Society in May 1895. It was moved in 1904, by Alexander Staples and his firm White & Staples, to a site at Bartlett and Marion streets in Leeper Park; moved again in 1916, to a site beside the reservoir; and again in 1954, away from the reservoir it had abutted. The Common Council designated it an honorary local historic landmark in 1988. By 2000 it had deteriorated until its survival was in doubt; it was restored and set on piers in 2006, and The History Museum used it for its Cabin Days school program each October. In 2019 the museum won a $25,000 grant from Visit South Bend/Mishawaka toward a further move, and in 2024 the cabin was relocated once more, to The History Museum's campus on West Washington Street, where it stands today as an interpretive site. The South Bend Tribune's history column has called it the oldest residence in St. Joseph County; on the record of its building and its moves, that is what it is — the one structure in the city that stands from before the city.

The rest of the pioneer stock: Almost everything else of the first building generation is gone or survives in altered form. The first courthouse of 1833 was demolished for its successor, as the courthouse entry below records. The oldest dated house in the city's districts is the Horatio Chapin House of 1857, in Chapin Park, itself moved once, in 1891. The pioneer commercial stock — the frame stores and hotels of the 1830s and 1840s along Michigan and Main streets — was replaced wholesale by the brick downtown of the later nineteenth century, and no building of the canal era stands downtown today. The pioneer city survives, in built form, as one cabin, one moved courthouse and one moved merchant's house; the rest of it is in the ground and in the record.

Sources:

1. The History Museum, "The Navarre Cabin" and "The First Settlers" (historymuseumsb.org) — the 1820 building, the site at 123 West North Shore Drive, the 1850 census, the 1895 donation, the 1904 move and the surviving timbers.
2. The History Museum, Navarre Cabin Homestead Project, application attachment for a Certificate of Appropriateness (3 February 2020) — the moves of 1904, 1916 and 1954, the 1988 honorary landmark designation (Common Council resolution 1602-88), the deterioration of 2000 and the $25,000 grant of 2019.
3. Visit South Bend Mishawaka, The History Museum listing — the cabin's relocation to the museum campus in 2024.
4. South Bend Tribune, "A Look Back: Navarre cabin is oldest residence in St. Joseph County" (January 2019).
5. The Clio, The History Museum tour — the 2006 restoration, the cabin set on piers, and the Cabin Days program.