The Michigan Hotel and the American Hotel

1831 – about 1851, and a new building on the site in 1866

Lead: The longest-lived hotel of South Bend's first age began as the Michigan Hotel, erected in 1831 by Peter Johnson at the southwest corner of Michigan and Washington streets, in the first year of the town's platting. Johnson's house was licensed to William L. Earl in 1834 and stood at the center of the 1835 land-office trade, when the federal land sales brought crowds of buyers to the bend and a hotel was a working part of the speculation. The stand's tavern side is carried in the Corridors account of this record; its course as a hotel, from Leeper's reminiscences in Howard's history, runs as follows. Johnson sold in 1836 to Charles Thrasher. On 12 December 1837 Thrasher sold to Abram R. Harper, John H. Harper, and John N. Smith, and the Harpers — probably, in Leeper's own hedge — renamed the house the American Hotel. Koehler & Duey rented it from January 1839 to November 1840; the Harpers then kept it themselves. In January 1845 smallpox came to South Bend and patients were quartered in the hotel, the ex-mayor William Miller among them — a house of lodging turned isolation ward in the town's first epidemic winter, told at its documented size here and in full in Howard.

Koehler & Duey became the owners on 25 August 1847. In 1850 they sold to Captain Samuel L. Cottrell, the furnishings going to Colonel Adam S. Baker, and Baker kept the house until the railroad was completed, about 1851. Daniel Haight and George Clark followed for some six months, and Sylvanus G. Gaylord kept it until he and Lot Day Jr. succeeded to the St. Joseph Hotel on 28 December 1858 — a succession that ties this house's last keeper to the first St. Joseph, told below. Leeper's verdict on the house stands as the record's own summary: it was "the longest-lived hotel known to South Bend, running as such for about a quarter of a century." The building itself outlasted its hotel life in pieces — the main building was later moved and stood at 215 West Navarre Street in Howard's day — and in 1866 a three-story brick rose on the Michigan and Washington corner where Johnson had built in frame thirty-five years before.

Sources:

1. Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), vol. 1, Samuel Leeper's hotel reminiscences, pp. 435–445, read first-hand.
2. The Corridors account in this record (the Michigan Road stands and the 1835 land-office trade).