The town plat of 1831: the city as a map first

The Original Plat, its date conflict, and its twentieth-century redrawing

The first map of South Bend is the town itself. The Original Plat laid the town out on paper in 1831 — all of it on the river's west bank, a rough polygon fitted to the ground rather than a clean rectangle, its streets including the Michigan, Main and Lafayette lines the modern downtown still runs on, its lots surveyed at a quarter acre. Everything else in this section is a picture of what grew on that plat. The plat's own facts are carried in the Before the City file, and one of them is a standing conflict this section prints rather than settles: the county histories' tradition, repeated by Genealogy Trails, dates the plat 7 September 1831, while Timothy Howard's successor history — Brown's Story of South Bend (1920), read first-hand for the Libraries file of this history — dates it 28 March 1831. The surveyor who ran the plat's lines is not established in the record reached: no name is printed here, because none has been proved, and the plat record in the county recorder's keeping is the named route to it. Where the original plat sheet itself reposes today is likewise not established in the sources reached — a gap named in the closing entry of this section.

The 1831 town as the twentieth century redrew it. The most-used pictures of the founding town are not from 1831 at all. The Indiana State Library's St. Joseph County list catalogs, under 1831, W. and O. E. Stelzer's Map of South Bend, Indiana, showing the settlement in 1831 and the companion View of South Bend in 1831 — both dated by the catalog to about 1933. They are twentieth-century reconstructions, drawn a hundred years after the fact from the plat and the records, and they are honest work of their kind; but a reader who meets them in the State Library's list or in the public library's digitized set — the St. Joseph County Public Library holds two copies of each and has digitized both — should know the date on the catalog line is the date depicted, not the date drawn. This section prints them as what they are: the 1930s' map of 1831.

The earliest city sheets in the local case. The public library's map case holds an 1838 Map of South Bend, Indiana — the earliest city map in the local collection, seven years after the plat; its maker is not established in the finding aid or the catalogs reached, and it is printed here at that size. The case also holds an 1846 Map of Lowell, Indiana — Lowell being the rival townsite downriver that is now part of South Bend, its own plat absorbed into the city's, as the Story of South Bend section file tells.

Sources:

1. Before the City file of this history — the Original Plat's west-bank extent, street lines and quarter-acre lots, and the 28 March / 7 September 1831 date conflict (Brown 1920 against the county-history tradition).
2. Indiana State Library, "St Joseph County Maps" (Indiana County Maps, Atlases and Plat Books) — the Stelzer Map of South Bend … showing the settlement in 1831 and View of South Bend in 1831, cataloged c. 1933.
3. St. Joseph County Public Library map case finding aid (20 December 2021) — the Stelzer pair (digitized, two copies each), the 1838 Map of South Bend, and the 1846 Map of Lowell.