The archive-keeping: pageants, voices and survey cards

1916 — present

The keeping begins as performance and print: South Bend's first great heritage projects were the anniversaries' books: the Historic Pageant of St. Joseph County of October 1916, whose printed pageant book fixed the county's story in scenes, and the Chamber of Commerce's souvenir volume South Bend, World Famed of 1923 — the Events account carries both as gatherings, and the Sources account shelves them as the books they are; here they stand as what they also were, deliberate acts of archive-making, the city writing its record down before the witnesses were gone. The institutional keeping ran beside them: the historical society of 1867 and its museum, whose collections the Museums account counts; the public library's Local & Family History room, whose holdings the Libraries account counts; and the Lou Sabo Historic Photograph Collection at the St. Joseph County Public Library, the photographic archive the Commission itself links as a partner resource.

The voices: The modern keeping is oral. The IU South Bend Civil Rights Heritage Center, formed in 2001 under Dr. Les Lamon, made an oral history program among its first and most fruitful efforts: students, staff and volunteers recorded and transcribed the stories of the people who lived the movement here — Helen Pope, Dr. Bernard Streets, Barbara Brandy and dozens more, named as the archive itself names them. The collection, held in the IU South Bend Archives, runs to six bankers boxes totaling 7.5 cubic feet; the bulk of the interviews date from the program's first years, and the program continues. Beside the boxes stands the joint digital archive: in January 2014 the St. Joseph County Public Library reached out to the Civil Rights Heritage Center and the IU South Bend Archives to combine their collections on African American and civil rights history, and the combined archive launched within the Michiana Memory website in February 2015. A renewed federal digitization grant — the Indiana State Library's LSTA Indiana Memory grant, from the Institute of Museum and Library Services — widened it: oral histories of African American and Latino history, and the first collection of LGBTQ history in the Michiana community, entered the same public archive.

The cards: The built record's keeping has its own digital form. The Historic Preservation Commission's survey cards — one for every rated building in the city, the working papers of the survey entry above — are now published by the University of Notre Dame's Building South Bend project (its full title: Building South Bend: Past, Present, Future), property by property, with the Commission's district guidebooks and property files carried into the open. What the surveyors of 1975–2005 wrote on cards in a city office, any reader may now pull up by address. Between the voices and the cards, the keeping of South Bend's past in November 2026 is substantially a published thing — which is the condition this whole history is built from, and the condition its Sources account itemizes.

Sources:

1. IU South Bend Archives, Oral History collection of the Civil Rights Heritage Center (finding aid, rev. May 2020) — the program's founding under Dr. Les Lamon (Center formed 2001), the named narrators, the six bankers boxes totaling 7.5 cubic feet, and the program's continuation.
2. ArchivesAware (Society of American Archivists), Federal Funding Impact Story #6 — the January 2014 partnership of the St. Joseph County Public Library, IU South Bend Archives and the Civil Rights Heritage Center; the February 2015 Michiana Memory launch; the 2015 LSTA/IMLS renewal and the oral-history, Latino and first LGBTQ collections.
3. City of South Bend, Historic Preservation Commission page — the Lou Sabo Historic Photograph Collection (Michiana Memory, St. Joseph County Public Library) linked as a partner resource.
4. Building South Bend, University of Notre Dame (buildingsouthbend.nd.edu) — the Commission's survey records published property by property.
5. Events and Sources accounts in this record — the 1916 pageant book and South Bend, World Famed (1923) as gatherings and as books, cross-referenced.