Major Donations: The Gifts That Built South Bend's Institutions

Major Donations: the gifts that built South Bend's institutions

South Bend's institutions run on other people's money, given on purpose — and the largest of that money did not come from South Bend. The university that stands in the unincorporated community of Notre Dame, immediately north of the city and covered in full in this history, has drawn the largest documented gifts ever attached to this place: 150 million dollars from a Chicago construction family, two separate commitments of 100 million, and a bequest from the widow of the founder of McDonald's. Inside the city limits the pattern is older and smaller and, gift for gift, no less consequential: a newspaper-and-banking fortune that bought a theatre for a dollar to save it, a schoolteacher's life savings that founded an art museum, a hospital built by subscription out of a converted house, and a single deer that founded a zoo. This section collects those gifts: Notre Dame's record ladder, the record gifts of the city's own campuses and colleges, the health and cultural gifts, the giving institutions seated here, and the founding benefactions of the first fortunes, and it closes with a ranked table of everything the record documents at seven figures and above.

Two rules govern what follows. Second, amounts are printed as announced, in the dollars of their year: a million dollars in 1947 and a million dollars in 2026 are different sums in purchasing power, and the year printed beside each figure is the reader's conversion key. Cumulative giving — a foundation's decades of grants, a family's lifetime of gifts to one institution — is labeled cumulative wherever it appears, and is never dressed up as a single check. Notre Dame's gifts are printed here as South Bend-area facts, the university standing in the Notre Dame community development district at the city's edge; where a gift's scope is regional or statewide rather than this city's, the table says so.