The dam of 1844, as a work in the river

1844 TO THE PRESENT STRUCTURE

One dam crosses the river inside this city, and it has been there since 1844: The power system the dam headed — the east and west races, the mills that lined them, the Oliver hydro plant, the gathering of the rights into a single utility, the filling of the East Race about 1954 — is the Industrial Revolution file's subject and stands there whole. This section owns the dam itself, as a work standing in the river. The structure that stands between Seitz Park and Island Parks today is a concrete-and-timber-crib dam whose original construction dates to 1844. It raised the river into a mill pond above the bend, fed the races on both banks, and carried the lock told above on its west side; the city's first water works drew through its head gates, and its pond was the working reservoir of the industrial city for a century and a half.

The question of whose company built it in 1844 — Chapman's South Bend Manufacturing Company against the National Register documentation following Howard — stands open in the Industrial Revolution file as one of this record's printed conflicts and is not re-tried here; Knoblock, for his part, also names the South Bend Manufacturing Company and its principal stockholders, the Harper brothers, as the dam's builders, and that vote of the navigation record is added to the conflict's file there. The dam's afterlife as a regulated work is documented at two points. In 1980 the City of South Bend sought and received from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission a licence exemption for a hydroelectric facility at Seitz Park — the dam entering the modern federal record a century and a third after it was raised.

And in the twenty-first century the dam passed into the river's newest use: the University of Notre Dame's hydroelectric plant, built under a 2016 agreement with the city transferring that exemption, generating from May 2022 and dedicated that September — ten turbines beneath Seitz Park, their output and the plant's whole record standing in Industrial Revolution, where the power arc closes. The dam brought one more work with it: a fish ladder on the city's reach, completed in 1992, one of the five ladders that let the lake's salmon and steelhead past the river's dams — the ladder as a structure is named here with the dam it serves; the fish that use it, and the count of them taken at this dam in the fall of 1992, stand in Local Animals.

Sources:

1. Water Power Magazine (November 2022) — the South Bend dam as it stands: a concrete and timber-crib structure between Seitz and Island parks, original construction dated to 1844; the city's FERC licence exemption of 1980; the 2016 transfer agreement behind the Notre Dame plant.
2. Otto M. Knoblock, Early Navigation on the St. Joseph River (1925) — the dam's building by the South Bend Manufacturing Company, A. R. and J. H. Harper principal stockholders, and the lock built into its west side.
3. This record's Industrial Revolution section — the dam's builder/date conflict carried whole, the races' power system, and the Notre Dame hydro plant; and its Local Animals section — the 1992 fish ladder's biology and the fall 1992 count at this dam; both cross-referenced.