The other state roads: the Vistula Road and the Chicago Road

1832–1978 · THE EAST AND NORTHWEST LINES

The Michigan Road was not the only road the state laid through the bend: The Vistula Road was the east–west twin of the Michigan Road's north–south line: a wilderness highway, in Howard's words, connecting with the Great Sauk Trail and running east through South Bend and Mishawaka across northern Indiana to Vistula, Ohio — the place now called Toledo. An act of February 1832 appointed commissioners "to survey, mark and locate a road from South Bend… by way of the mouth of the Elkhart River… and the county seat of Lagrange County to the east line of this State, in the direction of Vistula (now Toledo)"; the legislature named the line but, unlike the Michigan Road's act, fixed no width. The road took in older paths — the Dragoon trace and the Turkey Creek road toward Fort Wayne.

In South Bend its course ran to Wayne Street along the river, with Pearl Avenue continuing it to Washington Street; Howard records the street survival directly: "The Vistula road as it extends through South Bend is called Vistula avenue; while through Mishawaka it is known as Second street." Both of its downtown street survivals were erased in the renewal era — Pearl Avenue was removed in 1974, and Vistula Street was cut back to Monroe Street by 1978 — a disappearance that returns in this section's Lincoln Highway entry, because the 1913 Lincoln Highway entered the city on the Vistula Road. The county's northwest corner held the older line still: the Great Sauk Trail crossed the St. Joseph River near Bertrand and passed over the county's northwest part, and as a made road it became the Detroit and Chicago road — "or simply the Chicago road, as it is called to this day," Howard wrote in 1907. Howard adds the road-history counterfactual the record allows: Bertrand might have become a great city had the railroads not passed through Niles and South Bend instead.

Sources:

1. Timothy Edward Howard, History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907) — the Vistula Road's course and character, its special-act laying-out without a fixed width, the Dragoon trace and Turkey Creek road it absorbed, "Vistula avenue" in South Bend and Second Street in Mishawaka, the Great Sauk Trail's crossing near Bertrand, the Chicago Road name, and the Bertrand counterfactual.
2. The act of February 1832 as quoted in the road record — commissioners to survey, mark and locate the road from South Bend by the mouth of the Elkhart and the LaGrange county seat to the state line toward Vistula.
3. Chapman's History of St. Joseph County (1880) — the Vistula Road appears in the county record chiefly as its commissioners being "paid off," the whole of what that history preserves of its building.
4. Jim Grey's survey of the Vistula Road in St. Joseph County, from the 1875 county atlas and the street record — the Wayne Street and Pearl Avenue course downtown, Pearl Avenue's removal in 1974, and Vistula Street's reduction to Monroe Street by 1978.