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1836 – the building later burned
Lead: The Eagle Hotel stands on the first map of South Bend, drawn early in 1837: a story-and-a-half frame house at the southeast corner of Lafayette and Washington streets. Its lot was bought on 16 November 1835 by Levi Barnes and Samuel C. Russ, carpenters both, and in Leeper's judgment doubtless its builders. Russ held the tavern license at the May term of 1836 and again at the September term of 1837. The house kept about twenty boarders, canal and race men among them — the labor of the dam and race works lodging by the week — and its rate is the first hotel price the South Bend record preserves: three dollars for board and lodging.
The rate is preserved because it was fought over. In 1837 Benj. R. Hall of the Exchange, another of the town's houses, organized the keepers to raise the rate to three dollars and a half. The patrons answered with a meeting the record itself calls an "Insurrection": they rented the Collmer building and set up a rival boarding house of their own, and the keepers backed down. The episode is small and complete — the town's hotel men attempting a combination, the town's boarders breaking it by becoming hotel keepers themselves — and it is the earliest documented contest over the price of a bed in South Bend. The Eagle's later record is brief: on 4 July 1844 Lot Day Jr.'s arm was amputated in the house, the kind of surgery a hotel room hosted in a town without a hospital. The building later burned; in Howard's day the Kizer & Woolverton block stood on its site.
Sources:
- Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), vol. 1, Leeper's hotel reminiscences, read first-hand.