The New York purchase and the panic

1835–1842

The water power was first developed by men who never lived here: In 1835 Alexis Coquillard sold the water power at the bend to a company of New Yorkers — Joseph Fellows, Garrett V. Dennison, Thomas W. Alcott, James McKower, William J. Worth and John Van Buren, as the 1880 county history prints their names. In 1837 they began digging a race, and had a large quantity of timber ready for head-gates and locks, when the scheme collapsed in the hard times that followed the Panic of 1837, especially severe in the East. The sale had carried conditions — build a dam, dig a race, make the other improvements — and on the unmet conditions Coquillard sued to recover the property. He won in the lower court; the company appealed; and after the case dragged in the Supreme Court for several years the judgment for Coquillard was sustained. Coming back into possession, Coquillard made large improvements on the race himself. The property passed afterward to Samuel L. Cottrell and others. The National Register's East Bank documentation, working from the later county history, tells the same opening in shorter compass: the New York entrepreneurs purchased the water power and rights at South Bend from Coquillard, Coquillard was preoccupied with his Kankakee race, and the Panic of 1837 stopped the work entirely. The episode matters beyond its failure. It fixed the legal shape of South Bend industry for a generation: the fall at the bend was private property, held in shares, litigated like a mine, and developable only by whoever could raise eastern capital or wait out eastern panics. The town's manufacturers would spend the rest of the century as tenants of that arrangement — buying or leasing power from companies whose business was the river itself.

Sources:

1. Chapman, History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), "Utilizing the Water-Power," pp. 871–872 — the 1835 purchase, the six purchasers as printed, the 1837 digging, the collapse, the lawsuit and its end, Coquillard's improvements, and the passage to Cottrell. The name "McKower" is printed as the digitized text of the 1880 edition gives it.
2. National Register of Historic Places, East Bank Multiple Property Documentation Form (prepared by Camille B. Fife, The Westerly Group, June 1997; received January 1999) — the Fellows and Dennison purchase and the Panic of 1837's stoppage, from Howard's history.