The system at its peak — the banks of 1921 and the building-and-loans

1921

Seventeen institutions: Polk's 1921 directory lists seventeen South Bend banks, trust companies and loan offices, and the list is the fullest single picture of the city's banking at its pre-Depression height. Downtown stood the First National, the Citizens' National and its trust companion, the Merchants' National, the American Trust, the Union Trust, the St. Joseph County Savings Bank, the St. Joseph Loan and Trust, the Farmers' Trust, the South Bend State Bank and the Morris Plan Company of South Bend — an industrial-loan company incorporated in 1915 at 120 South Main with capital of $100,000, lending small sums on the Morris Plan system. Around them stood the neighborhood banks of the immigrant west and south sides, Polish and Hungarian institutions banking the factory districts in their own languages: the Chapin State Bank, organized 1911 at Chapin and Division under Polish-American officers with Michael Hazinski as president and — remarkably for a neighborhood bank — capital of $200,000; the People's State Bank at 1222 West Division, its officers Polish; the Public State Bank at 417 Chapin, chartered in 1921 with capital of $25,000 and a woman, Rose Fodor, as its president; the LaSalle State Bank, organized February 1920 at 524 East LaSalle Avenue; and the Washington State Bank, organized 1921 at 1301 West Washington Avenue. The individual ends of most of the neighborhood banks are not established in the sources reached for this section — the Depression took that whole tier of South Bend banking, and the record of exactly how each of them closed is named here as a gap rather than papered over.

The building-and-loan line: Beside the banks stood nine building-and-loan associations, the mortgage machinery of a city of workingmen's houses: the Building and Loan Association of South Bend, incorporated 5 July 1882, authorized capital $3,000,000, Elmer Crockett president; the Kościuszko Building and Loan Association, incorporated 1 September 1884, $3,000,000; the St. Joseph County Loan and Savings Association, 1889, $1,000,000; the Workingmen's Building and Loan Association, 1892, $850,000; the Indiana Savings and Loan Association of South Bend, August 1913, $2,000,000; and the Jan III Sobieski Building and Loan, the Guaranty Rural Loan and Savings Association, the American Home and Investment Company, and the River Park Building Loan and Savings Association. For two generations these associations, most of them ethnic and neighborhood-based like the banks beside them, financed the building of South Bend's residential streets.

Sources:

1. Polk's South Bend city directory, 1921, "Banks and Bankers" and the building-and-loan listings — the seventeen institutions with their addresses, capitals, officers and organization dates, and the nine building-and-loan associations with their incorporation dates and authorized capitals.
2. Federal Reserve change records, 1921–1930 — the Public State Bank's charter and its later history in the change cards (the bank's later name appears in the cards in a form the surviving copies do not let this section print with confidence).