The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1830s — 1850
The first ground added to the town's grid was not platted by the founders but by their creditor: Coquillard's project to cut a canal from the St. Joseph River to the Kankakee, passing through the ground west of the town, failed in construction and bankrupted its company; the traces of "Coquillard's Folly" — bridges built to span a canal that never carried water — survive in the City Cemetery. The State Bank of Indiana, which had underwritten the project, recouped its losses in the era's ordinary way: it subdivided the land into building lots. The Near West Side association's history names the result the "Bank Outlot Subdivision," and names its first house: Joseph Bartlett's, at 720 West Washington, erected in 1850 in the Federal style of his native New Hampshire. The outlots set the pattern the next century and a half would repeat — South Bend's neighborhoods repeatedly begin as somebody's balance sheet, a failed canal's, a founder's estate's, a streetcar company's, worked out in lots.
Sources:
- Near West Side (West Washington) Neighborhood Association — "History of the Neighborhood," westwashington.org (the canal, the bank's subdivision, the Bartlett house of 1850)
- Communities, this record (the trading town and the canal era at pointer size) — banked fragment