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1822 — present
Rum Village is the oldest named neighborhood ground in the city, and the only one whose name is a chief's: the Potawatomi village of Chief Torum — "Rum," in the rendering the record carries — stood on the ground southwest of the present downtown, north of West Ewing Avenue and west of South Main Street; Isaac McCoy conversed with its people in the spring of 1822, and the Keating expedition saw the village and its cornfields in 1824. The name test is the cleanest in this section: the city's own Rum Village Park Master Plan states the derivation outright, and the communities file carries the community's whole telling. The city acquired the park property in 1916, and the neighborhood that grew around the park kept the village's name — carried today by the Rum Village Neighborhood Association, in the city's consortium roster, an IGNITE grant recipient in 2023, with a Rum Village neighborhood plan among the plans in preparation in the city's framework and the park itself in master planning in 2025–26.
Sources:
- City of South Bend — Rum Village Park Master Plan (the Torum derivation); IGNITE announcement (2023); Department of Community Investment budget presentation (2026) — southbendin.gov
- Communities, this record (the village, McCoy and Keating, the 1916 acquisition — the community's telling whole) — banked fragment