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MARCH 1831
The city began as a speculation with 408 lots: Alexis Coquillard and Lathrop M. Taylor, who between them had come to own the townsite ground, laid out the town of South Bend on 8 March 1831 and recorded the plat that month. The plat lay entirely on the west bank of the St. Joseph River, and the East Bank multiple property documentation describes its figure plainly: roughly a polygon, its irregular right edge formed by the river itself. The lots were a quarter acre each; Taylor's own real-estate ledger, preserved in the scholarship on him, counts 408 lots sold out of the townsite purchase of $2,824.98 for $21,076.35 — the founding speculation priced whole, as the wealth file of this record carries it. The downtown multiple resource nomination names the grid the plat drew: three principal north–south streets — Michigan, Main and Lafayette — and three principal east–west streets — Washington, Market (now Colfax) and Water (now LaSalle) — which still form the nucleus of downtown.
The plat was also a bid. In 1830 the two proprietors and their associates were competing to fix the new county's seat at their town, and the commissioners' record, reprinted in Timothy Howard's county history, preserves the terms: bonds conveying numbered lots to the county's use, lots for religious societies and for school purposes, four acres for a public graveyard, and ground set apart and marked on the plat for a public square. The parks file of this record follows that square; what belongs here is that the town's first public ground, its church lots and its burying ground all arrived as lines on the founders' plat — the neighborhood framework of South Bend starts with a deed of gifts designed to make a town worth choosing. The seat was awarded to South Bend within months of the recording, in May 1831, over the brief rival village of St. Joseph. The claim that the townsite was disputed — that Taylor could not at first get title from the government and a compromise had to be bought from rival claimants for $1,200 and four lots — stands in the Tipton papers and Taylor's own record, and is printed here at that strength.
The plat's own text is still the downtown map: Michigan Street remains the Story of South Bend section, Main and Lafayette its parallels, and two of the three east–west streets carry later men's names over the founders' words — Market Street became Colfax Avenue, for the city's own vice president, and Water Street became LaSalle Avenue — the corridors file carrying the renamings at their own size. A plat is the one neighborhood document that never goes out of print: every deed downtown still describes its lots by the numbers Coquillard and Taylor's surveyor gave them in 1831.
Sources:
- East Bank Multiple Property Documentation Form (National Register, 1999) — the plat of March 1831, its polygon figure, the quarter-acre lots, the county donations — npgallery.nps.gov
- Historic Resources of Downtown South Bend, Multiple Resource Area nomination (1985) — the original plat's principal streets
- "The Early Years of Lathrop M. Taylor," Indiana Magazine of History — the laying out of 8 March 1831, the title dispute and compromise, Taylor's ledger of 408 lots
- Parks & Plans, this record (the public square and the county-seat bonds) — banked fragment