Notable People of South Bend

People · The Human Record of the Bend

South Bend's history was made by a knowable set of people, and this section holds them at the size the record gives them. It begins with the traders — a French-Canadian agent of the American Fur Company who built the first post at the bend in 1820, and the Detroit trader whose station the town grew around — and with the Potawatomi leader whose diplomacy kept his band on its own ground while removal emptied the valley around it. It holds the city's one vice president, Schuyler Colfax, at full size: the deputy auditor who became an editor, the editor who became Speaker of the House, and the Speaker whose career the Crédit Mobilier scandal ended without ever judging. It holds the printer who gave Colfax his start and carried the state's government printing press to Washington; the five Studebaker brothers and the two managers who rescued their company from its dead president's receivership; the Scottish plow-maker and the son who built Copshaholm; the Swedish minister's son whose brake company made South Bend the site of the first sit-down strike in an American auto plant, and the unnamed-by-history thousand who sat down in it. It holds Notre Dame's founder, its chaplain-president, and the president who ran it for thirty-five years; the Polish priest who built the west side's mother parish; the nun who presided over Saint Mary's for twenty-seven years and founded the first graduate school of theology open to women; the Croatian sculptor who ended his life as the university's professor with his Pietà in its basilica. It holds the Black attorneys who desegregated the city's pool in the courtroom's antechamber, the nurse who desegregated its hospitals and factories, and the councilwoman who became the Common Council's first Black president. It holds the comptroller who became a prisoner of war, a mayor, and a governor; the newspaper family that published the Tribune for five generations; the bank chairwoman who was Notre Dame's first female trustee; the Dutch immigrant whose tire store became the world's largest online tire seller; and the born-here — the Hall of Fame pitcher who retired to a Napier Street service station, the English teacher at Central High School who became John Wooden, the Washington High School guard the city honored as its first WNBA first-round pick. Where the record is thin, the entry is thin and says so. Where two sources give two dates, both stand.