A note on the other South Bend — the failure of 1895 that was not this city's

1895

The trap: Any search of the banking record for a failed "First National Bank of South Bend" returns a spectacular result: a receivership, a Supreme Court case, McClaine v. Rankin, 197 U.S. 154 (1905), over a bank that failed on 10 August 1895. It is not this bank, and it is not this South Bend. There was a second South Bend — in Pacific County, Washington — and its First National Bank held OCC Charter No. 4467, as the Comptroller's alphabetical list of 1917 shows, entering the two banks side by side: the First National Bank of South Bend, Indiana, No. 126, and the First National Bank of South Bend, Washington, No. 4467, the latter asterisked as closed. The Washington bank is the one that failed in 1895, under receivers Joseph G. Heim, Aldrich and George C. Rankin, in litigation that ran through the Ninth Circuit on Washington limitations law. Indiana's No. 126 was never in a Comptroller's receivership; it stands in the Comptroller's 1917 list and in Polk's 1921 directory, operating, and its charter ended only in the voluntary liquidation of 1932 recorded above. One widely used suspension database files the 1895 failure under Indiana against Charter No. 126; the Comptroller's list governs, and the entry belongs to a different state's bank.

Sources:

1. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Alphabetical List of National Banks, revised to 7 May 1917 (Government Printing Office) — South Bend, Indiana: First National Bank, No. 126; South Bend National Bank, No. 1739; Citizens' National Bank, No. 4764; Merchants' National Bank, No. 6334; and South Bend, Pacific County, Washington: First National Bank, No. 4467, asterisked closed.
2. McClaine v. Rankin, 197 U.S. 154 (1905) — the First National Bank of South Bend, Washington: failure 10 August 1895, the receivers, and the 1896 assessment.
3. Polk's South Bend city directory, 1921 — Charter No. 126 operating in South Bend, Indiana, in 1921.