The first mayors: the doctor, the poet, and the oldest man

1865 – 1884

William G. George (1865–1868): The first administration was the incorporation itself. George's government organized a city out of a town's machinery — its first council, its first ordinances, its first health officer — and in December 1866 carried the annexation of Lowell across the river. The local telling remembers him as the draftsman-mayor, a young Pennsylvania lawyer elected because he had written the city's birth papers and the voters saw no reason to hand his work to anyone else. He served three years and returned to his practice; the office he invented was, in those years, a part-time dignity laid over a working profession, and it stayed that way for decades.

Dr. Louis Humphreys (1868–1872): Humphreys (21 September 1816 – 9 May 1880) was the town's beloved physician before he was its mayor. He came from Ohio in 1838 to study medicine with his brother Harvey, took his degree at the Indiana Medical College in 1844 and set up at Main and Washington; in the Civil War he served as a field surgeon and was named by President Lincoln one of the Army's eight medical inspectors. Mayor George made him the city's first health officer in 1866 — his first works were sanitary, filling the holes and standing water of a river town — and in May 1868 he succeeded George, elected twice to two-year terms. He governed, by the History Museum's affectionate account, by doing as little governing as possible while never leaving his practice; the signature act of his mayoralty came in October 1871, when smoke from the Great Chicago Fire stood on the horizon and Humphreys organized a volunteer fire patrol that walked the wooden city in shifts around the clock until the rains came. He helped found the St. Joseph County Savings Bank and, in 1872, to organize the public library. South Bend was lit by gas for the first time on 11 December 1868, in his first year — the city entering its modern age under a mayor who still made house calls.

William Miller (1873–1876) and Alexander N. Thomas (1877–1878): The third and fourth mayors survive at roster size, and Miller's file carries a warning the record itself insists on: there were two William Millers in the first city government, both Republicans, both on the first council, and the later record tangles them. What is certain is the tenure — Miller to 1876, then one year of Alexander N. Thomas — and that the city they held was building furiously: the Oliver and Studebaker works rising, the population doubling across the decade. For Thomas, one year is what the record gives, and it is printed at that size.

Lucius G. Tong (1878–1880): Tong (1842–1908) was a young man of the university across the river — a Notre Dame student of Father Sorin's day, remembered in the local telling for a six-hour appeal of a student detention all the way to Sorin's desk — who grew into a banker and a civic fixture. The History Museum's mayoral series remembers him, with affection and some justice, as a really bad poet: his verses were a byword, and his mayoralty has come down wrapped in them. Under the joke stands a two-year administration of a town becoming a city in earnest.

Levi J. Ham (1880–1884): Ham (1805–1887) took the office at seventy-five, and remains the oldest mayor in the city's history. Another physician, he had stood before his Masonic lodge in 1868 and delivered, in the local telling, a short speech about his own approaching death — then lived nineteen more years, four of them as mayor. His election in 1880 also broke the new city's Republican run: Ham was the first Democrat to hold the office, a reminder that the mayoralty of the 1800s turned on the man and the ward more than on any machine.

Sources:

1. A Bend in Time (The History Museum), series 1, episodes 1–2 — George the draftsman-mayor; Humphreys's medicine, his health officership, the gas lighting of 11 December 1868 and the 1871 fire patrol.
2. The biographical record of Louis Humphreys (Anderson & Cooley, 1901, and the references built on it) — his 1816–1880 dates, the 1838 arrival and 1844 degree, Lincoln's medical-inspector appointment, the Savings Bank and the 1872 library.
3. Aaron Helman, South Bend News-Times mayoral series (2026) — William Miller and the two Millers of the first council; "South Bend's Fifth Mayor Was a Really Bad Poet" (Tong); "Levi Ham: South Bend's Oldest Mayor."
4. The History Museum's list of mayors — the tenure years throughout.