The city's own centennial, 1923 — and the birthdays the record does not show

1923 · citywide

The founding's hundredth year: South Bend dated its founding to Alexis Coquillard's fur-trading post of 1823, and in 1923 the Chamber of Commerce promoted the centennial of that founding. The promotion's surviving monument is its souvenir volume, South Bend, World Famed, published by Handelsman & Young in 1923 under a Chamber committee on which Walter M. Hildebrand chaired public affairs — a book that invites the world to the celebration while conceding, in its own pages, that the celebration's form and date were still being fixed as the book went to press. For precedents it reached back to the city's own Homecoming of 1909 and to Indiana's homecoming observance of October 1916 — the two gatherings the volume's makers held up as proof of what South Bend could do. The founding story the centennial told was fixed in bronze five years later, when the Rotary Club's marker of 1928 stated it in one sentence: "South Bend was founded as a fur trading post in 1823 by Alexis Coquillard."

The honest negative: The city's other round birthdays do not appear. The county's centennial fell in 1930 and the centennial of the city's incorporation in 1965, and directed searching for this section found no documented South Bend celebration of either year — no 1930 county-centennial observance and no 1965 city-centennial observance in the record reached — while the founding's centennial of 1923 and the incorporation's sesquicentennial of 2015 are documented in detail. The 1909 Homecoming stands the same way: it survives as the 1923 volume's citation of it, a gathering the city remembered fourteen years on, whose own particulars were not reached. The record of the city's birthday parties is printed at exactly that size.

Sources:

1. Handelsman & Young, South Bend, World Famed (1923) — the centennial souvenir volume: the Chamber's promotion, Hildebrand's committee, the undecided form and date, and the precedents of 1909 and 1916.
2. Rotary Club founding-site marker, erected 1928 — the civic founding sentence the centennial fixed.
3. Directed searches of the Tribune retrospectives, the History Museum's published columns, and the digitized county record, November 2026, for 1930 and 1965 observances — negative, as stated.