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1941–2023
The inn: Ernest M. Morris built the Morris Plan and Associates fortune told in the Wealth and Founders legs; its signature gift was his and Ella Morris's 1 million dollars to Notre Dame for the Morris Inn, the university's on-campus hotel, constructed in 1952 with their gift. The university's accounts divide on the gift's year — one places it in 1947, another about 1950 — and both stand; the figure is not in dispute. A banking family's million built the inn that still carries the family name at the campus entrance.
The theatre: The fortune's most famous gift cost the giver an undisclosed sum and the city one dollar. In 1959 the board of the Palace Theatre — the 1922 vaudeville palace on Colfax Avenue — voted to demolish it. Ella M. Morris bought the building, for a price the record does not state, and sold it to the City of South Bend for 1 dollar. The city renamed it the Morris Civic Auditorium; restored in a 17 million dollar project completed in 2000, it is the Morris Performing Arts Center, the anchor of the city's performance life. No amount attaches to the gift beyond the dollar of the resale, and none is printed; it stands in the table's below-the-line list because its consequence outweighs most seven-figure gifts in this record.
The pattern around them: The Morris giving begins earlier and runs longer than either landmark. In March 1948 Mr. and Mrs. E. M. Morris sponsored the Indiana Room at the new South Bend Art Center and donated their collection of Indiana art — the first five artworks the institution acquired, as the museum's own account records. In 1941 Morris bought the bankrupt Clement Studebaker Jr.'s Tippecanoe Place — the mansion that had cost 250,000 dollars to build — for 20,000 dollars, and gave it to the South Bend schools, which held it for a generation. The third generation carried the pattern back to Notre Dame: in 2011 Ernestine Morris Raclin — Ernest and Ella's daughter — the Carmichael Foundation and her family made the lead gift for the renovation of her parents' Morris Inn (the renovation's cost, more than 30 million dollars, is a project cost, not the gift, and no gift figure is published); she contributed to Raclin-Carmichael Hall, the medical-education building dedicated 25 October 2005 that houses the Indiana University School of Medicine–South Bend and Notre Dame's Keck Center; and in December 2017 she and her daughter Carmen and son-in-law Christopher J. Murphy III — the chairman of 1st Source Corporation — made the lead gift for the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art at the university's entrance, which opened in November 2023. The museum's building cost 66 million dollars; the lead gift's amount is not published, and this section prints the gift without one. The Ernestine M. Raclin School of the Arts at IU South Bend likewise bears her name on a gift whose amount the record reached does not state.
Sources:
- The Wealth and Founders & CEOs legs of this history — the Morris Inn gift of 1 million dollars and its divided year; the Tippecanoe Place purchase and gift of 1941.
- Morris Performing Arts Center — the center's own history, and Discover Indiana — Ella Morris's purchase of the Palace and its resale to the city for 1 dollar, 1959.
- South Bend Museum of Art — the museum's own account of the Indiana Room and the Morris collection gift, March 1948.
- University of Notre Dame news releases (8 December 2017; 23 October 2005; 14 July 2023) — the Raclin Murphy Museum lead gift, the Raclin-Carmichael Hall dedication, and the Raclin obituary record of the Morris Inn renovation lead gift.