A county, and a county seat that had to be moved

29 JANUARY 1830 — 1831

The tidy version of this story is wrong in an interesting way: St. Joseph County was created by act of the Indiana legislature on January 29, 1830, effective April 1, and organized that August — named, like the river, for St. Joseph. The standard short account then says that South Bend was "laid out as the county seat in 1831, with 128 residents." The record underneath says something better. The county seat was first located, in May 1830, not at South Bend at all but on William Brookfield's farm in German Township, two and a half or three miles northwest of the settlement, at a paper town called St. Joseph. South Bend's men went to work to move it: Colonel Taylor, by his own account preserved in the county's 1875 illustrated atlas, "secured 128 names to a petition to the Legislature to get the county seat changed to South Bend." The 128 of the familiar sentence are not a population count; they are the signatures on Taylor's petition. New commissioners re-located the seat at the village of South Bend — the 1875 atlas dates their action May 12, 1831, while later county fact sheets give the choice as September 7, 1831 — and the first courts, which had met in Alexis Coquillard's house, had a county seat that has never moved since.

The same season the town itself took shape on paper: in 1831 Coquillard and Taylor laid out the town site, and South Bend stood as one of the four original townships of the new county. That year Horatio Chapin arrived and opened the first general store stocked with goods brought in from outside the region, and helped establish the settlement's first church and Sunday school. In 1835 the town was formally established — incorporated under a board of trustees, with Chapin as the first president of the board. The trading post had become a town, with a plat, a courthouse trade, and a government: the first of the three foundings of South Bend, the other two being its water power and its factories.

Sources:

1. An Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Joseph County, Indiana (Higgins, Belden & Co., 1875) — the January 29, 1830 act, the county's organization on August 27, 1830, the first seat on the Brookfield farm, Taylor's 128-name petition, and the commissioners' relocation of May 12, 1831.
2. Indiana state county information (in.gov) — St. Joseph County's founding date of January 29, 1830, and South Bend as county seat.
3. Northern Indiana Center for History, "Facts about St. Joseph County," as carried in county histories — the September 7, 1831 dating of the seat's choice, and the first courts in Coquillard's house.
4. City of South Bend reference history — the 1831 laying-out, Chapin's 1831 arrival and store, and the town's formal establishment in 1835 with Chapin heading the trustees.