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Folklore: The Stories South Bend Tells
Folklore, in this section of the record, is handled the way an archive handles a letter: what is told, who told it, and when it was first written down come first, and the checkable record stands beside the telling in plain type. Every tale below is printed with its earliest documented telling and its named teller or collector where the record gives one; variants stand at survey size; and where the record has a verdict, the verdict is printed in the same entry, in the same size. The city's ghost lore — the apparitions with addresses — is told in the Haunted Places section, and the Grotto's tale-life with the university's own ground in the Notre Dame and Famous Locations sections; both are pointed to from here, not retold. What follows is only the telling, with its papers showing.
The River's First Names: Sheggwe and the Man Who Appeared Like a Mushroom
Names in use before 1689 · printed in Notre Dame Magazine
The tale: Before the river was the Saint Joseph, it was Sheggwe — “SHAG-wah” — in the telling Notre Dame Magazine prints from its three authorities: the Potawatomi name for the river whose southern bend gives South Bend its name…
The Chief's Son Who Printed the Legends: Simon Pokagon's Books
1893–1900 · the band's own published tellings
The fact the tales stand on: the Potawatomi tales of this valley did not have to wait for an outside collector to reach print. They were printed, in his lifetime and under his own hand, by a chief's son. Simon Pokagon (c. 1830 …
The Rumpus Over the Name: How South Bend Stayed South Bend
1829–1830 · the tale as Fay Folsom Nichols tells it
The documented core: the place's first post office, applied for in 1829, went onto the federal books as Southold — addressed, in the postal geography of the day, to Allen County, Indiana. The name lasted about a year: in 1830…
The Old Settlers' Stock: The Stories Howard Collected
1832–1907 · reminiscences read before the Northern Indiana Historical Society
The collectors: South Bend's pioneer tales come down in a named custody. Timothy E. Howard's History of St. Joseph County (1907) prints, in its early chapters, the reminiscences of the last survivors — men and women who had…
Wheelbarrow Johnny
1853–1858 · John M. Studebaker's California years
The tale: John Mohler Studebaker went west in 1853, to Hangtown — Placerville, California — and the story the family and the company told of him ever after is the wheelbarrow. In the telling carried by Farm Collector 's “Let's…
The Sixty-Eight Dollars and the Wagon That Ran Thirty-Three Years
1852 · the founding tale, in its printings of 1907, 1918 and 2002
The founding as the county history prints it: Howard's History (1907) states it in the sentence every telling since has quoted: “With sixty-eight dollars in cash and stock-in-trade, these two boys opened a blacksmith shop in…
Rum Village: The Drink That Never Named It
1822–today · the folk version at tale size, its correction beside it
The tale as told: Ask the city why its southwest-side neighborhood and park are called Rum Village and the answer that comes back first, in the park's own podcast age, is the bottle: that the name remembers liquor — a…
The Names They Brought With Them: Złote Góry, Warszawa, Krakówo, Bogdarka
1877–1910 · the Polish west side's naming lore
The tale-stock: South Bend's Polish west side named itself the way emigrants name a new world after the old, and the names are the neighborhood's folklore in its purest form — stories compressed into single words, told every time…
The Vanishing Man
Christmas Eve, in the story · its correction in Unsolved Mysteries
The pointer: the tale of Oliver Lerch — the South Bend young man who stepped out to the well on Christmas Eve with a bucket, called for help from the dark, and was never seen again, his voice fading into the sky — is the most…
The Girlfriend Who Never Was: The Hoax the Paper Carried
September 2012 – January 2013 · the newspaper-hoax stock, at its record size
The search first: a folklore record looks in the city's newspaper for the tales the newspaper itself made — the April Fools' fabrications and planted hoaxes by which American papers once kept a folklore of their own. For the…
The Archive and the Schoolyard: Where the County's Telling Was Filed
1956–1990 · the Indiana University Folklore Archives
The collection: the children's rhymes, the playground games, the jokes, the beliefs and the local legends of Indiana schoolyards were, for a generation, collected as scholarship down in Bloomington: the Indiana University…
Pointers: The Grotto, the Ghosts, and the Claims
Cross-references, kept short on purpose
The Grotto: the tale-life of Notre Dame's Grotto — Father Corby's 1896 building of it, the candles, the customs that gather at a shrine — belongs to the university's own ground, and stands in this history's Notre Dame section…