South Bend Government: Incorporation, the Mayors and the Acts of the City

Government · Incorporation, the Mayors, and the Acts of the City

South Bend governed itself for thirty years before it had a mayor. The town was platted in 1831 as the seat of St. Joseph County, organized under a board of trustees in 1835, and only in the spring of 1865 — in the month after Appomattox, a timing the city still carries in its motto, "Peace" — did its voters choose to become a city, 286 votes to 194, and elect William G. George, the lawyer who had drawn up the incorporation papers, as their first mayor. Thirty-three mayors have followed that vote, and this section holds the whole civic line: the rented rooms the young city government worked out of, the city hall a plow-maker built for it in 1902, the joint County-City Building it shared with the county for half a century, and the City Hall it opened in 2025. It holds the mayors entire — the physicians, engineers, judges and comptrollers who took the office, the one who died at his desk's threshold in a car crash in 1960, the Republican who took office three weeks after Studebaker's closing broke and governed the wreckage for eight years, the comptroller who became a governor, the councilman appointed to succeed him who stayed fifteen years, the 29-year-old who became a presidential candidate and a cabinet secretary, and the chief of staff who followed him. And it holds the acts of government that outlast any one administration: the answer the city made to the loss of its largest employer, the urban renewal that remade and wounded whole neighborhoods, the thirty-year war over annexation that the city mostly lost, and the rebuilding of downtown, project by project, from 1977 to the present. The company's story is told in the Studebaker section and the university's in the Notre Dame section; the fight over the segregated Natatorium belongs to the Black history & civil rights section. What is here is the city's own government, on its own record.