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1916 — present
The name is a man's, not a drink's: the City of South Bend's own Rum Village Park Master Plan states the naming plainly — the park, and the neighborhood that took its name, remember the Potawatomi village of Chief Torum, "Rum," that stood on the ground. Isaac McCoy conversed with the people of Rum Village in the spring of 1822, and the Keating expedition of 1824 saw the village and its cornfields; David Leeper's later account put a tapped maple on the site at about 1773 by its rings. The city acquired the park property in 1916, and the neighborhood that grew around it — southwest, north of West Ewing Avenue and west of South Main Street — is Rum Village still. Its Storyland Zoo, open 1957 to 1981, stands in the zoo file of this history; the park itself is in master planning as this section is written, the city's plan process under way in 2025–26 — the oldest-named ground in the city, still being planned as a community place.
Sources:
- City of South Bend — Rum Village Park Master Plan (2025–26): the naming, the McCoy and Keating accounts, the 1916 acquisition
- The Zoo, this history (Storyland Zoo, 1957–1981) — banked fragment