The traders: the men the town grew on

1820 – 1865

Pierre Frieschutz Navarre (dates not established in the record read): the settlement's first resident trader. An educated French-Canadian in the service of John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company, Navarre came up the St. Joseph River in 1820 and established the first trading post at the south bend of the river, on land that was still, in law and in fact, Potawatomi land — the county record's "1820 — First Trading Post" in The Story of South Bend's list of firsts. He married into the valley, taking a Potawatomi wife, as the trade required and the record states. His post was the fixed point around which everything after accumulated, and his cabin — the oldest building of the settlement story — survives in the keeping of The History Museum in South Bend. His vital dates are not established in the sources read for this section, and the entry does not invent them.

Alexis Coquillard (1795–1855): the trader the town grew on. Born at Detroit on 28 September 1795, Coquillard established his post at the bend in the early 1820s — the record carries the settling season as 1823 and as 1824, and the Before the City section prints both — and his station, Big St. Joseph Station, gave the settlement its first name. His wife, Frances Comparet, who came in 1824, is remembered as the first white woman of the settlement. Coquillard's trade policy was town-building: the ferries, land gifts, and encouragements to settlers that the guides credit jointly to him and Taylor began as his — a post needed a town around it. When the federal cessions made the townsite buyable, Coquillard and Taylor bought it together and platted the town in 1831. His second career is the valley's wound: the removal contracting of 1840–43, under which the Potawatomi who had traded at his post were emigrated west, is told in the Before the City section, where it belongs. In the city he helped found he built mills, cut the Kankakee race, stood friend and host to Father Sorin at Notre Dame's founding in 1842 — Sorin's party came first to Coquillard's house — and gave the land for the city cemetery. He died in 1855. The deep record — the trade, the townsite purchase, the removal contracts — lives in the Before the City section; this is his size in the human record: the settlement's leading trader for three decades, on both sides of its founding bargain.

Lathrop Minor Taylor: the second founder. In 1827 Taylor opened a competing post at the bend for Samuel Hanna and Company of Fort Wayne, and the settlement acquired its paper trail of names: Coquillard's station name was Big St. Joseph Station; Taylor's house styled the place St. Joseph's, Indiana. When the two men applied for a post office, with Taylor as postmaster, the office was designated Southold; in 1830 the name was changed to South Bend. Taylor was the townsite's co-purchaser and co-platter with Coquillard in 1831, and the town's first merchant generation worked in his and Coquillard's shadow. The record read for this section gives his South Bend career in documents rather than dates; his vital dates are not established here and are not invented.

Horatio Chapin: the first storekeeper and the town's first president. Chapin arrived in 1831 and opened the town's first general store. When the town organized under a board of trustees in 1835, Chapin was chosen the board's first president, serving 1835 to 1837 — South Bend's head of government before it had mayors. His full civic record stands in the Government section; here he closes the founding generation: the trader-post town of 1820–31 became, in his store and his trusteeship, a governed place.

Sources:

1. Before the City section of this history (banked) — Navarre's 1820 post and the American Fur Company service, the marriage, the cabin at The History Museum; Coquillard and Taylor's rival posts, the Southold post office and the 1830 renaming; the townsite purchase and 1831 plat.
2. Government section of this history (banked) — the 1835 board of trustees and Chapin's presidency, 1835–37; the first general store, 1831.
3. The Story of South Bend (Edythe J. Brown, 1920), as carried in the Before the City section — the "1820 — First Trading Post" entry in its list of firsts.