The frame: a town of trustees, then a city

1831 – 1865

The plat and the county seat: South Bend was laid out in 1831 — the town plat recorded that March — as the seat of the new St. Joseph County, on land the fur traders Alexis Coquillard and Lathrop M. Taylor had bought and platted at the southernmost bend of the St. Joseph River. The settlement counted 128 residents. From the beginning its reason for existing on the map was governmental as much as commercial: it was the county seat, and the county's business — its courts, its commissioners, its records — was done there. The Story of South Bend section of this history tells the founding; what belongs here is the government the place grew.

The town organization of 1835: For its first years the town had no municipal government of its own. In 1835, on the call of the county commissioners, the town's voters elected a board of trustees — Horatio Chapin, Peter Johnson, William Howe, John P. Massey and James A. Hendricks, as the 1901 city history of Anderson and Cooley names them — and Chapin, the merchant who had arrived in 1831 and opened the town's first general store, was chosen the board's first president, serving 1835 to 1837. Edythe J. Brown's The Story of South Bend (1920), whose twelfth chapter is a history of the town's forms of government, counts 1835 as the first incorporation of South Bend. The trustees governed the town for thirty years; Brown records that their elections were at times so neglected that the machinery had to be set right again — the town government of the period was a part-time affair laid over a trading and farming village.

The vote of 22 May 1865: By 1865 the town held several thousand people, a railroad, foundries and wagon works, and a county growing rich around it. That spring its residents voted on incorporation as a city. The History Museum's account of the canvass gives the count: 286 votes for incorporation, 194 against — a sixty-percent majority. The date was 22 May 1865, a month after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox effectively ended the Civil War; the city's official motto, "Peace," is carried in the standard accounts as a mark of that timing. The first city election followed two weeks later, on 5 June 1865.

The first mayor: The man the incorporators chose was the man who had written the papers. William Greenawalt George, a 32-year-old lawyer, a native of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, was elected the first mayor of South Bend, in the History Museum's telling "by common consent." He served until 1868. One of his first acts of government, in 1866, was to appoint the physician Louis Humphreys as the city's first health officer — and, as the next section of profiles records, the council in December 1866 annexed Lowell, the separate little town laid out in 1837 on the east bank of the river opposite South Bend: the city's first annexation, eighteen months into its life.

Sources:

1. Anderson & Cooley, South Bend and the Men Who Have Made It (Tribune Printing Co., 1901) — the town organization of 1835, the first trustees and Chapin's presidency 1835–1837, and the December 1866 annexation of Lowell; read in the Internet Archive copy.
2. Edythe J. Brown (comp. and ed.), The Story of South Bend (1920), ch. XII, "History of the Forms of Government in South Bend," and its table of South Bend firsts ("1835 — First Incorporation of South Bend") — read in the Internet Archive copy.
3. A Bend in Time, the South Bend History Museum podcast, series 1, episode 1, "William George" (The History Museum) — the incorporation vote of 22 May 1865 (286–194), the election of 5 June 1865, and George as the papers' draftsman elected by common consent.
4. The standard city record as carried in reference accounts of South Bend — the 1831 laying-out as county seat with 128 residents, the motto "Peace" and its Appomattox timing, and incorporation as a city on 22 May 1865.