The boundary that would not move: annexation and the counted effect

1866 — 1992

Fort Wayne's population record has to warn that its city grew by redrawing its borders; South Bend's has to warn of the opposite: The city's first annexation came eighteen months into its incorporated life, when it took in Lowell, the little town laid out in 1837 on the east bank opposite. Through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the line moved outward with the streetcar districts, and by the time the industrial climb ended the city held the ground it substantially still holds. After the Second World War the pattern broke. The city sought annexations across five decades and lost them, usually in court, to the remonstrance of the county residents themselves; the subdivisions the war generation built went up outside the line — Granger, Georgetown, the Clay Township suburbs — apart from the 1950s additions the city did capture, among them the new Edison Park and Miami Hills subdivisions, built inside the line that already existed there. What annexation remained possible was small: on 12 January 1970, the same night it dedicated its new chambers in the County-City Building, the council passed Ordinance 5137-70, annexing some 177 acres west of Michigan Street between Ireland Road and the bypass — the scale of the achievable, set against the 2,000 acres it could not have.

The 2,000 acres were the universities. Beginning in 1969, Mayor Lloyd M. Allen's administration sought to annex the ground north of the city including the campuses of Notre Dame, Saint Mary's and Holy Cross. The motive, as Roger O. Parent — a councilman in those years and mayor a decade later — recalled it, was arithmetic: state and federal money followed population, the 1970 census was about to record the city's first decline, and the students inside the line would count. The council balked in 1969; after a tumultuous hearing in January 1971, at which Father Edmund P. Joyce, the university's executive vice president, warned that a favorable vote would be fought in court, it voted the annexation down, 6 to 3. The universities remain outside the city to this day.

The last campaign repeated the shape at larger scale: the study Mayor Joseph E. Kernan commissioned in 1992 shaped a plan to double the city's land — most of Clay Township, Knollwood, the unincorporated Notre Dame ground — and the fight ended at the Statehouse, where the legislature enacted a law restricting annexation for cities in St. Joseph County, a statute that applied to no other county in Indiana. The Government section tells these fights in full; their counted effect is the point here. South Bend was left with the limits the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had given it, so its census series measures people, not jurisdiction: when the number fell after 1960, it fell because residents left or were not replaced on the same 41-odd square miles, and the growth that in another Indiana city would have been annexed into the count accumulated instead in the county balance printed in the series entry — 169,459 people in 2020 living in St. Joseph County outside the city that is its seat.

Sources:

1. Government section of this history — the annexation of Lowell, the postwar remonstrance defeats, Ordinance 5137-70 and its 176.9 acres, the Notre Dame campaign of 1969–71 with the 6–3 council vote and Mayor Parent's recollection of the motive, and the Kernan plan of 1992 with the county-specific state statute, all cross-referenced and not retold here.
2. U.S. Census Bureau — the city's land area, 41.46 square miles (2010) and 41.98 (2020), Census QuickFacts; the county balance is computed from the series table.