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1830–1860
St. Joseph County was organized by act of the General Assembly dated January 29, 1830, effective April 1, 1830, and its first seat of justice sat briefly on William Brookfield's farm southwest of the bend before the commissioners settled the seat at South Bend on September 7, 1831. In the interval the county's first courts met in Alexis Coquillard's house, and the county's first law officer was its sheriff: Samuel L. Cottrell, who had come to the county in 1829 and was appointed sheriff in 1831 — the board's record allows him $32 for services rendered as sheriff that year — and again in 1834.
The first jail was ordered on Tuesday, November 1, 1831, the board of county commissioners — Aaron Stanton, David Miller, and Joseph Rohrer — sitting at Coquillard's house. The order survives in the commissioners' own words: a jail thirty feet long and sixteen feet wide, with a partition wall through the center, "all the timber of the walls to be of good white oak timber, and to be hewed at least one foot square," set lengthways north and south on the southwest corner of the public square in South Bend, its door on the east side, the contractor bound in $1,000 to finish by the last Monday of April. The builders, Woods & McCormic, did not finish to contract; on April 28, 1832, the board examined the building, took it off their hands by agreement, and allowed each man $206.90. The little oak jail filled often enough that in January 1835 the commissioners ordered a second story, doubling its capacity.
The courthouse followed within weeks of the jail. In January 1832 the commissioners voted to build, advertised for bids in a regional newspaper, and on February 7 accepted Peter Johnson's proposal: a brick courthouse for $6,000, forty feet square, facing Main Street at the corner of Main and West Washington. By the 1850s it was judged too confining; in 1853 the county commissioned John M. Van Osdel to design a successor at $35,000, and another jail followed in 1860, also at $35,000. That is the whole of the county's punitive plant at the moment the murder record opens: a brick courthouse, a county jail, a sheriff, and the circuit court riding its terms. The court files of the 1830s and 1840s, as the histories preserve them, hold the ordinary frontier docket of debts and assaults — and, by Chapman's accounting, no killing at all.
Sources:
- St. Joseph County Commissioners' order of November 1, 1831, and receipt of the jail, April 28, 1832, transcribed in the county-buildings record (Genealogy Trails, from the county histories)
- Chas. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), pp. 364–366, as cited in Indiana University South Bend, African American Landmark Tour, "St. Joseph County Courthouses"
- Higgins, Belden & Co., An Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Joseph Co., Indiana (1875) — Cottrell's appointment and the $32 allowance
- Indiana University South Bend, African American Landmark Tour — the 1835 second story, the 1853 Van Osdel courthouse, and the 1860 jail