The annexation course: how the plats became one city

1831 — 2026

The city's area grew by swallowing its neighbors' plats, in five dated campaigns: the first was the East Bank's — most of Lowell and Sorinsville taken in with the incorporation of 1866 and organized as the Fourth Ward, the two remaining East Bank parcels following in 1871 — so that the city's first annexation was also its first neighborhood merger, a rival town and a priest's village absorbed whole. The second was negotiated rather than taken: River Park's 1910 choice, told in this section's River Park entry, after which the city's north edge ran to the state line's suburbs. The third was the postwar capture: the subdivisions of the 1940s and 1950s — Forest Park, Miami Hills (annexed by Ordinance 3760 in 1950 under its plat), Scottsdale, Wooded Estates, Edison Park and their fellows — were built inside the limits or brought in as they rose, and the city took in 177 acres west of Michigan Street between Ireland Road and the bypass by Ordinance 5137-70 in January 1970.

The fourth campaign failed, and its failure bounds the map still: the campaign to annex the Notre Dame ground, pressed from 1969, died before the council in January 1971 by six votes to three, and the university ground remains outside the city in the Notre Dame CDP. The fifth was the long suburban bid: Mayor Kernan's housing forum of 1989 and the 1992 study that projected the city's taxable base doubling on annexation of the ring — a campaign the state legislature answered by restricting annexation for the cities of this county altogether. The government file carries each act at its own size; what stands here is the shape: a city assembled from a plat, a rival town, a voted-in suburb and a generation of filed additions, bounded where a university and a legislature each told it no. The city covers 42.4 square miles today, the Story of South Bend section file's figure.

Sources:

1. Government, this record (the 1866 and 1871 annexations, Ordinance 3760 of 1950, Ordinance 5137-70 of 1970, the Notre Dame vote of January 1971, the Kernan campaign and the state restriction) — banked fragment
2. East Bank Multiple Property Documentation Form (1999) — the Fourth Ward organization