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1947–today
The art museum's founding: The South Bend Museum of Art begins, like Fort Wayne's, with a gift — but a schoolteacher's, not an industrialist's. Carlotta Banta taught kindergarten at Perley School for thirty-five years; her will bequeathed her life savings toward the creation of an art center where, in her testament's words, beautiful pictures would hang and little children would come to look. The South Bend Art Center opened on her bequest in 1947. The amount of a kindergarten teacher's life savings is not published in the museum's own account, and none is printed here; the Morris Indiana Room gift of the following year, told in the Morris entry, was the young institution's second benefaction.
The library and the rest: The St. Joseph County Public Library — a tax-supported institution across its nine branches and its rebuilt Main Library — shows no single major private gift in the record reached; its support is the tax levy and the broad Friends pattern, and its record in this section is that absence, printed as found. The same discipline closes the leg's survey: the Potawatomi Zoo's capital history is campaigns rather than a signature gift; the South Bend Symphony and the city's theatres beyond the Morris show campaigns, not patrons. In a section about the largest gifts, the absence of one is also a fact, and it distinguishes the institutions a patron built from the institutions everybody maintains.
Sources:
- South Bend Museum of Art — the museum's own account of Carlotta Banta's bequest and the Art Center's opening in 1947.
- The Libraries and Nonprofits legs of this history — the public library's support structure and the cultural institutions' funding patterns.