The founding benefactions: town lots, a church split three ways, a fountain, and a deer

1830–1921

The county-seat bargain: South Bend's first documented gifts were the price of its existence. In the county-seat bargain recorded in Chapman's county history, William Taylor, Alexis Coquillard, Joseph Rohrer, Samuel Studebaker, Samuel Hanna and David H. Colerick bound themselves to pay 3,000 dollars if the county seat were permanently located at South Bend, and Taylor and Coquillard donated fifteen lots for the county's use, lots for three congregations, and four acres for a public graveyard — the founding speculation's charitable face, priced in the Wealth section from Taylor's own books at 2,824.98 dollars in against 21,076.35 out. Coquillard's giving continued into the town's institutions: the county seminary completed in 1845 stood on land he donated downtown, the site where the city's first high school later rose.

The church in thirds: The industrial fortunes' giving begins, in the record, with a church. The National Register nomination for the First Presbyterian Church, built in 1888, records a cost of approximately 35,000 dollars, of which one-third was to be paid by the congregation, one-third by James Oliver, and one-third by John M. Studebaker — the city's two great fortunes splitting a building with the people who would worship in it. Clement Studebaker's church money — the funds for St. Paul's Memorial United Methodist Church, given in memory of his father-in-law George Milburn — stands in the Religion section's record. The amounts of the era are small against the table below; their position at the head of it is chronological, and the pattern they set — the fortune building the city's common institutions in proportion — is the pattern the Morris and Leighton gifts continued.

The fountain: John M. Studebaker, who had seen an elaborate cast-iron fountain at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876, commissioned one like it — electrified — as a gift to the city. The Studebaker Electric Fountain, 28 feet high, was unveiled in Howard Park on 21 July 1906. Dismantled in 1941 and thought melted for scrap, its top third was rescued by Mary and John Seiler; in 2009 their descendants donated the surviving pieces to The History Museum, and after a community restoration campaign the fountain was rededicated in Leeper Park in 2019 — one gift, given twice, a century apart.

The deer: The smallest founding gift in this record founded a zoo. In May 1921 the Board of Park Commissioners accepted Studebaker president Albert Russell Erskine's offer of a single deer as the foundation of a zoo at Potawatomi Park — the founding act of the Potawatomi Zoo, whose own record, including the one-year seam between the parks chronology's 1920 line and the 1921 minutes, stands in the Zoo leg. The deer carried no dollar figure and needed none: it is the proof, at the head of this section's table as at its foot, that the size of a gift and the size of its consequence are different measures.

Sources:

1. The Wealth section of this history, from Chapman's county history and the Taylor–Coquillard books — the county-seat bond and the donated lots; the First Presbyterian Church National Register nomination — the 1888 cost and its thirds.
2. The Schools and Religion sections of this history — Coquillard's seminary land; Clement Studebaker's church gift.
3. Indiana Landmarks (2022) and the Studebaker Fountain historical marker — the fountain's commission, unveiling, rescue, the 2009 gift and the 2019 rededication.
4. The Zoo leg of this history — the park board's acceptance of Erskine's deer, May 1921.