The Park Board: Created, Abolished, Restored

1891–1901; 1901–1910 under Public Works; 1910–present

Lead: South Bend has governed its parks three ways, and the department's own master plan tells the board's course in its E-3 section in the same words the first county history uses. "On June 8, 1891, the South Bend Common Council Elected a Board of Park Commissioners. This Board served until [the] new city charter was enacted in 1901, when the Park Board was dissolved and the Board of Public Works took over the administration of city parks." The first commissioners, with the terms the plan's roster preserves, were Frank Mayr (1891–1894), Corwin B. Vanpelt (1891–1898) and Samuel S. Perley (1891–1893); Joseph E. Robert sat with Mayr and Vanpelt by July 1893, and Martin J. Roach and Oren G. Huff were elected with Vanpelt on 25 June 1894. It was this board that waged the Howard Park campaign of 1891–95 — the improvement report, the sea-wall appropriation, the end of the dumping — before the special charter of 1901, the charter the Government history tells, swept it away with the rest of the old council government.

Under the Board of Public Works the parks were a superintendent's charge. The city's officer rosters as Howard prints them name John G. Barker — the landscape artist who had laid out Howard Park — as superintendent of parks in 1902, and Herman H. Beyer in 1904, the officers for 1905, 1906 and 1907 being "the same as for 1904." The newspaper record the Tribune's Leeper Park account preserves dates Beyer's appointment by the Board of Public Works to 1903, as landscape artist, engineer and superintendent of the Park Department, charged with designing Leeper Park; by the close of 1906 Beyer was reporting to the city as park superintendent on a system in full growth, in the annual report Howard prints entire. In 1910 the legislature changed the authority over parks back to a Board of Park Commissioners, and the department's chronology marks the restoration with two appointments: "1910 — Herman Byer appointed as first Park Superintendent" — the chronology's spelling and its framing, the first superintendency under the restored board, set here beside Beyer's documented service of 1903–1906 under the old one — and, in 1912, A. E. Perley appointed park superintendent.

The board's long-serving members anchor the interwar department: Richard Elbel retired in 1937 after twenty-eight years on the board. The department's narrative head adds that "with the adoption by the South Bend Common Council of an ordinance in 1929, the South Bend Department of Public Parks was first formed" — a forming the chronology itself does not separately date, printed here as the plan's narrative gives it. The modern superintendency runs Jim Seitz, appointed 1971 and retired 1988 after, the chronology says, eighteen years; Karl Stevens, named his successor in 1988; and Phil St. Clair, appointed 1992, honored in 2011 as the longest-serving park superintendent, and retired in 2016, when Aaron Perri was named executive director. In 2017 the department was restructured and renamed: South Bend Parks and Recreation became South Bend Venues Parks & Arts, the name it works under today.

The board itself now sits as the plan describes it: four members, not more than two of the same political party, appointed by the mayor to four-year terms, operating under the Indiana Park and Recreation Law (Indiana Code 36-10-3), with authority over the department's operation, its lands, its capital programs and its bonds. The city's cemeteries have ridden with the parks through the whole course — the 1902 roster lists a cemetery sexton among the city officers, and the department's 2021 inventory still carries Bowman Cemetery and the Historic City Cemetery among its properties.

Sources:

1. City of South Bend Venues Parks & Arts, Master Plan Update 2021–2025, sections E-2 (the chronological history: 1891 creation; 1901 abolition; 1910 restoration and appointments; Elbel's retirement 1937; Seitz, Stevens, St. Clair; Perri 2016; the 2017 restructuring) and E-3 (the board's present composition and powers; the past commissioners' roster; the board's history in the plan's own words; the 1929 department ordinance in the narrative head).
2. Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907–1908), read first-hand (the city officer rosters of 1902 and 1904: Barker and Beyer as superintendents of parks; the cemetery sexton; the board's membership of 1893 and 1894 in the Howard Park history).
3. South Bend Tribune account of Leeper Park (2006), catalogued by the Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library's local history file (Beyer's appointment by the Board of Public Works, 1903).