The First Public Ground: The Plat's Public Square

1830–1831, and the square since

Lead: The first public ground in South Bend was not a park. When Lathrop M. Taylor, Alexis Coquillard and their associates bid for the county seat in 1830, the bonds they gave the county commissioners conveyed the town's numbered lots to the county's use, together with lots for religious societies and school purposes and four acres for a public graveyard — "in addition to the lots and ground set apart and marked on the plat of said town for a public square, religious and school purposes," as the commissioners' record, reprinted in Timothy Howard's county history, puts it. The public square was the town's civic ground from the plat of 1831 forward. The county's first jail was contracted to stand on the southwest corner of the public square, and the courthouse of 1853–55 — the building the Architecture history follows through its turning and rolling of 1895–96 — was placed near the square's northeast corner, facing east on Main Street. Howard, writing the park chapter of his 1908 history, measured his city against its neighbors on exactly this point: in Goshen, Plymouth, Valparaiso and LaPorte a full square is devoted to the courthouse, "but in South Bend but one quarter of a square was set apart in the beginning for that purpose." The founders of Kalamazoo, he noted, had laid aside two full squares for public parks besides their courthouse square; South Bend's founders laid aside none. The square remained courthouse ground, and the city's green framework had to be built later, on other land, by other means — which is where the record of the parks properly begins.

Sources:

1. Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907–1908), read first-hand: the county-seat bonds as reprinted in the county commissioners' record (the public square "set apart and marked on the plat"); the jail contract (southwest corner of the public square); the 1854 St. Joseph Valley Register description of the new courthouse (northeast corner of the public square); and the parks section of the city-improvements chapter (the quarter-square comparison).
2. Architecture section of this record (the courthouse buildings on the square, including the 1853–55 courthouse and its 1895–96 move).