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1823–1831 — from the Big St. Joseph Station to the plat
The man and the post: Alexis Coquillard was born at Detroit on 28 September 1795, a child of the French fur-trade world, and he came to the St. Joseph valley in the American Fur Company's service. The accounts divide on the season of his settling, and the file prints the division: The Story of South Bend (1920) has him come to the post in 1823, aged twenty-eight, and buy out the business Navarre had established the following year; the account the public-television history carries has him pass through in 1823 and return in 1824 with his family to stay. Either way, by 1824 the post was his: he brought his wife — Frances Comparet, the county record's first white woman of the settlement, 1824 — and he brought capital, in the partnership of his father-in-law Francis Comparet, whose investment the WPA guide puts at a sum said to approximate $75,000 to buy the American Fur Company's agency for the upper lakes country. His first trading post stood on the Dragoon Trace, the old trail from Fort Wayne, at present East Washington and Lincoln Way East. He was, by every account including his rivals', the settlement's engine: the ferries, land gifts and encouragements to settlers that the guides credit jointly to him and Taylor began as Coquillard's trade policy — a post needed a town around it.
The rival and the names: In 1827 Lathrop Minor Taylor opened a competing post for Samuel Hanna and Company of Fort Wayne, and the settlement acquired its second founder and its paper trail of names — the record of a place being renamed as it was reimagined. Coquillard's station name was Big St. Joseph Station. Taylor's house styled the place St. Joseph's, Indiana, in its records. When the two men applied for a post office, with Taylor as postmaster, the office was designated Southold — in Allen County, the valley still being attached to Fort Wayne's county for want of one of its own. The following year, 1830, the name was changed to South Bend, the WPA account says by the Post Office Department, probably — the later retellings add — to end confusion with other Southolds. The sequence matters to this section because it is the ground acquiring an American administrative identity in four steps, each one a document: station, rival's style, post office, county town. Coquillard's own full record — the mills, the Kankakee race, Notre Dame's founding friendship with Father Sorin, the city cemetery gift, his death in 1855 — belongs to the civic and people records. Here he stands at the size the pre-city record gives him: the trader whose post the town grew on, who with Taylor bought the townsite from the government when the cessions made it buyable, and whose other career — the removal contracting of 1840 that emptied the valley his trade had depended on — is told in the removal entry below, where it belongs.
Sources: Brown, The Story of South Bend (1920) — Coquillard's birth, the 1823 coming, the 1824 buy-out and Frances Comparet Coquillard; WNIT (PBS Michiana), "Our Town: South Bend" — the 1823 passage and 1824 family return, Big St. Joseph Station, Taylor's 1827 post and the Southold designation; Indiana: A Guide to the Hoosier State (1941) — the Comparet investment figure as that account gives it ("said to have approximated"), the name sequence and the 1830 change; Anderson & Cooley, South Bend and the Men Who Have Made It (1901) — the biographical frame; National Register, East Bank historic context — the two men's joint ownership of the plat ground by 1831.