The fall of water at the bend

THE INDUSTRIAL PREMISE

The factory city starts as a slope in a river: The St. Joseph comes south out of Michigan, bends at this place to run back north to Lake Michigan, and in bending it falls — a drop the early town measured not in scenery but in horsepower. The valley's first peoples, the portage between the St. Joseph and the Kankakee, and the trading-post era that made Alexis Coquillard the bend's leading man are told in the Before the City and Spine sections of this record. What belongs here is the use the town found for the drop. A river's fall at a townsite meant that flour could be ground, lumber sawn, and wool carded by water instead of by hand or horse, and that a place with a fall could sell power the way another place sold land.

Coquillard understood the asset early: as the Story of South Bend section records, in 1831 he and his partner Lathrop M. Taylor claimed water rights on both banks of the river at the bend, and by 1835 he was promoting a race to carry the river's power to mill seats. He was also digging at a grander scheme — a canal from the headwaters of the Kankakee across the divide to the St. Joseph, so that the two watersheds the portage joined on foot would be joined by water. The 1880 county history records that the Kankakee race was actually dug, and that from its fountain head the Kankakee's water was made to flow, by art, in both directions — so level is the divide at the bend. The canal powered Coquillard's own mill west of the river, as a South Bend magazine of May 1919 still remembered it; the scheme's larger promise died with the money panics of the decade, but the digging taught the town its industrial geography lesson early: at the bend, water could be made to work.

Sources:

1. This build's Spine and Before the City sections — the 1831 Coquillard and Taylor water-rights claim on both banks and the 1835 race promotion, cross-referenced and not retold.
2. Chapman, History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), watershed section — the mill-race dug from the headwaters of the Kankakee to the St. Joseph at South Bend, its waters made to flow in both directions from the divide.
3. South Bend Today, May 1919 (Michiana Memory, St. Joseph County Public Library) — Coquillard's canal between the St. Joseph and Kankakee gave his mill its power; printed as the period account it is.