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1830 — 2020
A county that filled in a decade, a city that filled in eighty years: The first era is settlement, and its rates are the rates of empty ground filling. St. Joseph County went from 287 people in 1830 to 10,954 in 1850 and 33,178 in 1880, as the land sales, the river trade and the first farms drew settlers to the bend of the St. Joseph. The town trailed the county at first — 1,652 people in 1850, a seventh of the county — because a townsite plat is a claim, not yet a place. The railroads changed the proportion: the city nearly doubled in the 1850s, nearly doubled again in the 1860s, and passed half the county in 1890.
The second era, from 1880 to 1930, is the industrial climb, and it belongs to the city. South Bend multiplied almost eightfold in fifty years — 13,280 to 104,193 — as Studebaker's wagon works, the Oliver Chilled Plow works, Singer's cabinet plant, the Birdsell works and their suppliers stacked working-class districts around the factories, and the immigrant streams told in the foreign-born entry below supplied the hands. The city's share of the county peaked at 68.7 percent in 1920: at the height of the climb, better than two of every three county residents lived inside the South Bend line. The city crossed 100,000 in 1930, the census that closed the era — and the same decade shows the county's fastest growth of all, 54.9 percent, as Mishawaka and the townships industrialized alongside.
The third era is the interruption. Between 1930 and 1940 the city shrank 2.8 percent — its first decline in the record — and the county grew just 1.1 percent, its slowest decade on the table: the Depression stopped the migration that had fed the factories for fifty years, and Studebaker spent the decade in and out of receivership, as the Studebaker section tells. Growth resumed with the war and the postwar boom: the city added 14.5 percent in the 1940s and 14.3 percent in the 1950s, reaching its peak of 132,445 in 1960 — but the geography had already changed. From 1950 on, the county grew faster than the city in decade after decade, the city's share slid from 56.5 percent toward 38, and the new population piled into the unincorporated townships and into Mishawaka — the suburban story the next entries take up in numbers.
The fourth era is the long decline, and its arithmetic is the subject of the entry after next: five shrinking censuses in six, from 132,445 in 1960 to 101,168 in 2010, a loss of 31,277 people, 23.6 percent of the peak. The fifth era is the stabilization the last two counts record: a gain of 2.2 percent in 2000 — the city's first since 1960, and in composition a changed city, as the modern-composition entry shows — a further fall of 6.1 percent in 2010 as the Great Recession's decade closed, and a gain of 2.3 percent in 2020, to 103,453, with the Bureau's estimates holding the city at about that figure since. The count's verdict on the present is narrow and should be stated narrowly: the falling has stopped; the recovery, in population terms, has not begun.
Sources:
- The decennial census table in the preceding entry; all rates, shares and balances are computed from it.
- Studebaker and Government sections of this history — the receivership decade and the postwar record, cross-referenced and not retold here.
- U.S. Census Bureau, Population Estimates Program — the post-2020 estimates as cited in the preceding entry.