The French of the trading town

1820 — 1860s

The town's first settler community was French: Pierre Frieschutz Navarre, who established his post at the bend in 1820, and Alexis Coquillard, who built the trading house, the mill race ambitions and the town plat itself, headed a French and French-Canadian trading community — voyageurs, interpreters, clerks and their Potawatomi and métis families — that the before-the-city file documents from the treaty and post records. Coquillard's role as founder is the Story of South Bend section's first chapter; the community fact is that the town at the bend was bilingual and intermarried at its founding, and that the French families' Catholicism is the seedbed from which the city's parish map grew — the first settled Catholic congregation in the area worshipped at Notre Dame from the 1840s, and the city's first parish, St. Joseph's, bought its land in the town of Lowell in 1847, as the Lowell entry below records. The French community left no separate institution standing under its own name; it dissolved into the town it founded, and its names survive on the map and in the founding record rather than in a quarter of their own.

Sources:

1. The Story of South Bend section and Before the City, this history — banked fragments, /srv/brain/history/indiana/south-bend-full/
2. History Museum, South Bend — "Early South Bend" (Lowell, St. Joseph's land purchase of 1847) — historymuseumsb.org