The Farmers banks — the Farmers Security Bank and the Farmers' Trust Company

1915 – 1920s

Two companies, one address apart: The farm trade of St. Joseph County supported its own banking group on South Main Street. The Farmers Security Bank built its banking house at 133 South Main in 1915, to the designs of the Chicago firm of Perkins, Fellows and Hamilton — a building that still stands. The Farmers' Trust Company was organized in 1916 at 135 South Main, in what was called the Farmers Trust Building, with capital of $106,700, and a companion Farmers Securities Company was organized the same year. The record reached for this section carries the group no further than its buildings: in 1925, the National Register nomination for 133 South Main records, mergers renamed the Farmers Security Bank building the Associates Building, after the Associates Investment Company — the automobile-finance company Ernest M. Morris had founded in 1917, whose president would rescue the First National six years later. In 1940 the First Bank and Trust Company moved into 133 South Main, and the building was known for forty years as the First Bank Building, until the bank moved out in 1982. The Farmers' Trust Company's own end is not established in the sources reached and is named as a gap.

Sources:

1. National Register of Historic Places nomination, Farmers Security Bank Building, 133 South Main Street (National Archives copy) — the 1915 construction for the Farmers Security Bank, the 1925 mergers and renaming as the Associates Building, the First Bank and Trust Company's tenancy from 1940 and departure in 1982.
2. Polk's South Bend city directory, 1921, "Banks and Bankers" — the Farmers' Trust Company, organized 1916, 135 South Main, capital $106,700, and the Farmers Securities Company, 1916.