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, there being other Southolds to confuse it with, the Post Office Department renamed the office for what the place already called itself — South Bend. That is the whole of the paper record, and it stands in this history's opening section. Around it, the telling grows a meeting, a speech, and a river captain.

The tale: as Fay Folsom Nichols — the Kankakee valley's own historian-storyteller, whose Choice Grain gathers the region's grain of story — retells it, there was dissatisfaction with the name and a wish in some quarters to change it to Southold, and a meeting of the citizens was called to settle it. At the meeting an objector rose against the bend: “calling a town by the name of south bend — a bend in a river, the name of a town! Unthinkable!” And the tale gives the last word not to the meeting but to the river: Madore Cratee, captain of the Fairplay, “continued to come down the St. Joseph and unload his little freighter at the south bend in the river. South Bend it is today.” In Nichols's telling the town's name was saved the way river names are actually saved — by use, on the water, against the wishes of the meeting. Her scene is printed here as her scene: a twentieth-century storyteller's shaping of the documents, set beside the documents, which give the year, the rival name, and the department's reason, and no speeches at all.

The frame around it: Nichols's chapter sets the naming winter in the Union Hall, Benjamin Coquillard's new tavern, “a house of Public Entertainment,” where that same winter the Reverend N. B. Griffith organized the first Sunday school — “and probably participated in the rumpus over naming the city,” she writes, putting her own probably on the join between the record and the tale. This section follows her example and marks the same join: the rumpus is the tale; Southold is the record; and the two have been told together ever since, which is itself the folklore fact.

Sources:

1. This history, opening section — the post office applied for in 1829 as Southold, addressed to Allen County in the postal geography of the day; the Post Office Department's 1830 renaming to South Bend, there being other Southolds to confuse it with.
2. Fay Folsom Nichols, Choice Grain (Kankakee Valley Historical Society) — the citizens' meeting, the objector's speech, Captain Madore Cratee of the Fairplay, “South Bend it is today,” the Union Hall winter and Griffith's probable part in “the rumpus over naming the city”; printed here as Nichols's retelling.
3. The History Museum, South Bend, “The First Settlers” — Alexis Coquillard's 1823 trading post and standing as the city's founder; Benjamin Coquillard's tavern generation, for the Union Hall frame.