The tavern era: the road's houses and the town's first licensed rooms

1831 — 1865

The road's taverns, pointed to: The first drinking houses on this ground belonged to the Michigan Road, and their record is told in full in the Corridors section of this history. Its headlines belong here at pointer size: Peter Johnson's Michigan Hotel, at Michigan and Washington streets, opened in 1831 — a hewed-log house lit by tallow dips that took the road's wagon trade and, by tradition, hosted General Winfield Scott on his Black Hawk War march in 1832; the county commissioners' own order book records tavern licenses issued at the September term of 1836, Earl's Tavern among them; and Lilly's Tavern, the road's later South Bend house, ended its days removed to Jefferson Street as a warehouse of the Studebaker wagon works. The tavern of the road era was inn, stable, court room and bar in one licensed premises, and South Bend's first government met in such rooms — the county's first courts sat at Alexis Coquillard's house, as the Crime section records.

The town's frame: Inside the town itself, the licensing power sat with the county commissioners, whose 1831 orders also built the first jail (the Crime section prints the order), and the trade they licensed was the town's ordinary equipment from the start: when South Bend incorporated as a city in May 1865, the saloon — the word the directories and the courts now used — was already its standard drinking institution, and the saloon era, not the tavern era, is where this city's bar record gains its names.

Sources:

1. Corridors section of this history — Peter Johnson's Michigan Hotel (1831), the commissioners' tavern licenses of the September term 1836 including Earl's Tavern, and Lilly's Tavern removed to Jefferson Street as a Studebaker wagon-works warehouse; cross-referenced here, not retold.
2. Crime section of this history — the county's first courts at Alexis Coquillard's house and the commissioners' order of 1 November 1831 for the first jail.