Anderson & Cooley, South Bend and the Men Who Have Made It (1901)

South Bend: The Tribune Printing Co., 1901

What it is: South Bend and the Men Who Have Made It: Historical, Descriptive, Biographical — Illustrated, compiled by Anderson and Cooley and published in South Bend by the Tribune Printing Company in 1901. Its title page survives in the New York Public Library's copy, scanned by the Internet Archive (Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations stamps on the leaf). It is the city's turn-of-the-century who's-who: a narrative history followed by the biographies of the men then running the city — among them the St. Joseph County Forum's passage from the Drapiers in 1853 to John B. Stoll's Times company, and John Millikan's memory of the Free Press, both quoted in the newspaper entries below.

Its standing, from this build's experience: a booster biography volume is evidence of what its subjects wanted believed in 1901, and read that way it is rich — firms, partnerships, successions, the furniture of the business city. Read as neutral narrative it needs a check beside it, and this build checked it where it could. Where it could not, it declined: the 1901 succession list of the city's police chiefs reached the Public Servants and Crime legs only through a column-scrambled machine scan of the book, and the exact years were deliberately not printed from it. The settling read is the printed page, or the Allen County Public Library's copy — it stands on the pull list.

Sources:

1. Title page of the 1901 volume (New York Public Library copy, Internet Archive item southbendmenwhoh00ande).
2. National Register nomination bibliographies (Chapin Park and Battell Park historic districts) for the imprint.