Marked by its own hand: the Rotary marker and the landmark tour

1928 — 2020s

The sentence in bronze: Before the state set a single marker in this county, the city marked its own founding. In 1928 the Rotary Club of South Bend erected a marker at Michigan Street and LaSalle Avenue reading, in full: "On this site South Bend was founded as a fur trading post in 1823 by Alexis Coquillard, who came here from Detroit, Michigan, representing the American Fur Company." It was the centennial of 1923, five years on, fixing the founding story the Chamber's souvenir volume had told — and it is printed here as a heritage artifact, with the record's correction standing beside it where this record keeps it: the Before the City and Stories Told accounts carry the documented ground, Pierre Navarre's post of 1820 at the bend and the townsite cession of 1821, against the marker's 1823 sentence. The marker still stands and still says it; a history of how the city marks its past prints both the bronze and the record, and harmonizes neither.

Marking by publication: The modern city's self-marking runs to print and screen as much as to bronze. The Civil Rights Heritage Center's landmark work produced Placing History: An African American Landmark Tour of South Bend, Indiana — a book-length tour of the landmarks where the city's Black history was made, written from the Center's archived oral histories and published by Indiana University South Bend, free in print and as an e-book — a marker program in the form of a book, setting the Black landmarks into the city's official memory one address at a time. It belongs to a documented line of such work: the Center's research fed the landmark nominations and the state markers of the modern run (the Better Homes marker of 2017 and the Allen marker of 2020 stand on ground this scholarship mapped), and its podcast, South Bend's Own Words, produced with the university's Raclin School of the Arts, carries the archived voices themselves. The garden sign at the Natatorium — "This is the last building standing that tells the story of segregation in South Bend" — is the same impulse at its smallest scale: the city labeling its own evidence, in its own words, on the ground where it happened.

Sources:

1. Rotary Club of South Bend founding-site marker (erected 1928; Michigan Street at LaSalle Avenue) — inscription as catalogued in the Historical Marker Database.
2. Events account in this record — the 1923 centennial and its souvenir volume, cross-referenced; Before the City and Stories Told accounts — the documented founding ground (Navarre, 1820; the cession of 1828) against the marker's sentence.
3. Indiana University South Bend, Civil Rights Heritage Center — Placing History: An African American Landmark Tour of South Bend, Indiana (aalt.iusb.edu), its basis in the Center's oral histories, and its free print and e-book publication; South Bend's Own Words podcast (Civil Rights Heritage Center with the Ernestine M. Raclin School of the Arts).
4. Museums account in this record — the Natatorium garden sign's sentence, in the city's own words.