The nineteenth century · a blank page, and the quiet decades after

1838–1933

No case: South Bend had banks from the State Bank of Indiana's branch, located here in 1838, through the national charters of 1863 and after, and the county's historians chronicled those banks in detail — their charters, officers, corners and failures. What none of those chronicles contains is a robbery. Chapman's 1880 history of St. Joseph County, Anderson and Cooley's 1901 history of the city, and Timothy Howard's 1907 county history, whose banking chapter the Banks section draws on, record no robbery or burglary of a South Bend bank between them. Full-text searches of the digitized Indiana newspaper corpus, run for this section over the period, surfaced no South Bend bank robbery of the era either. The losses of nineteenth-century South Bend banking were of the other kind — panics, runs and failures, in which depositors rather than bandits emptied the vaults — and that record is told in the Banks section.

The bandit decades: the first third of the twentieth century prints the same way. Indiana's documented bank-bandit era — the Pierpont gang's Indiana list of 1924–25, Marion, Noblesville, Upland, New Harmony, Kokomo — touched towns all over the state, and the standard robbery lists compiled from the court and Bureau record carry no South Bend bank on any of them. No robbery of a South Bend bank before 1934 was found in the record reached for this section, and the city's bank history for those years, as the Banks section tells it, is a record of organization, consolidation and Depression failure — South Bend State Bank liquidated, Union Trust and American Trust suspended in June 1931, the Citizens' National in receivership in March 1934 — not of robbery. The first documented robbery of a South Bend bank in this record is the one that made the city's name in the gang era, and it stands in the next entries.

Sources:

1. Charles C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880); Anderson & Cooley, South Bend and the Men Who Have Made It (1901), banks chapter; Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), vol. 1, §16 — the banking chronicles searched; no bank robbery or burglary appears in any of them.
2. Library of Congress newspaper corpus (Chronicling America / Hoosier State Chronicles), full-text phrase searches for South Bend bank robberies, 1860–1935, run for this section — no South Bend case surfaced.
3. Documented Pierpont-gang and Dillinger-gang robbery lists (see the gang-era entry in the Fort Wayne bank-robberies file and the test entry below) — no South Bend bank before June 30, 1934.
4. Banks — the Depression failures and suspensions of 1931–1934, and the FDIC-era failure test (negative for South Bend).