The State Bank of Indiana's South Bend branch — the first bank

1838 – 1858

The branch system: Indiana's first mature bank was the State Bank of Indiana, chartered by the legislature on 28 January 1834 — a state-owned institution that did business not from one office but through branches in the state's principal towns, each branch locally directed and each issuing the bank's notes. South Bend, a seven-year-old county seat, wanted a branch and worked to get one. The county history of 1907 names the men who secured it: Dr. John A. Henricks, Thomas D. Baird and George Crawford of Elkhart County. A public meeting was held on 22 February 1838, and that summer the branch's stock was sold: the subscription books opened on 2 July 1838 under commissioners Alexis Coquillard, Lathrop M. Taylor and John Grant — the fur trader and the town's co-founder among them — and when the books closed on 4 August they were oversubscribed by more than a thousand shares.

The opening: The branch opened for business on 24 November 1838, the first bank in South Bend. It began in a two-story brick building on the northeast corner of Michigan Street and Colfax Avenue, and in 1841 moved across the intersection to a porticoed building on the southwest corner, where it remained until the state bank's charter expired in 1858. Its presidents across the twenty years were Tyra W. Bray, John Egbert, Lathrop M. Taylor, Anthony Defrees, Jonathan L. Jernegan, Samuel C. Sample and Ricketson Burroughs; Horatio Chapin, the merchant who had presided over the town's first board of trustees, was its manager and cashier, and when the branch wound up at the charter's end it was the teller, Marshall P. Chapin, who settled its affairs. A note on dates: the state bank's branch at South Bend is sometimes dated 1836 — that is the year of the legislative authorization under which branches were later established; the South Bend branch itself was stocked in the summer of 1838 and opened that November, as the county history's dated account records.

Sources:

1. Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), vol. 1, §16, "Banks" — the branch's securing, the meeting of 22 February 1838, the subscription of July–August 1838, the opening of 24 November 1838, the two buildings at Michigan and Colfax, the presidents' list, and Marshall P. Chapin's settlement of the branch's affairs; read in the full text.
2. Edythe J. Brown (comp. and ed.), The Story of South Bend (1920) — Horatio Chapin as the branch's manager and cashier.
3. The State Bank of Indiana's legislative charter of 28 January 1834 and the standard state-banking record — the branch structure of the bank; the 1836 authorization date carried in general accounts of the bank, against Howard's dated 1838 establishment.