Sorinsville: the priest as subdivider

1855 (or the 1870s) — present

The East Bank's second neighborhood was a university's real-estate venture: in 1855, under Father Edward Sorin's urging, the administration of Notre Dame decided to develop some of its East Bank property, about a mile south of the campus, and a 120-acre development that came to be called Sorinsville was platted — so the East Bank multiple property documentation dates it. Lots were offered for a down payment of $25, the rest to be paid in labor, trade or long-term credit: the institution hoped to attract the Catholic laborers, especially the Irish who had come to work on canals and railroads, and the area was also called "little Dublin" or the "village catholique." A few faculty residences were built along its lanes, one of which, the Maurice Egan House, remains. Its streets were named for patrons and persons in Notre Dame's history — Napoleon Street for Napoleon III, in the documentation's example — and Sorin Street and Notre Dame Avenue carry the naming scheme still.

The platting is dated a second way, and the conflict is printed rather than resolved: Notre Dame Magazine's account of Sorinsville, carried in the communities file of this record, places Sorin's 120-acre development in the 1870s. The two tellings agree on the substance — Sorin, 120 acres, a Catholic workingmen's village northeast of the campus ground — and disagree by some twenty years on the plat. What is documented on both tellings is the village's fate: Sorinsville was incorporated into South Bend with most of the East Bank in 1866 as part of the new Fourth Ward, and its crossroads — Five Points, at Eddy Street, Corby Boulevard and South Bend Avenue — became the city's off-campus corner for the century that followed. The neighborhood that grew on the plat is treated in this section's Northeast entry; Sorinsville itself survives as the oldest layer of it, its street names the surviving text of the plat.

Sources:

1. East Bank Multiple Property Documentation Form (National Register, 1999) — the 1855 platting, the $25 terms, "little Dublin," the Egan House, the street names
2. Notre Dame Magazine — "Sorinsville" (the 1870s dating), as carried in Communities, this record — banked fragment