The fur traders: Navarre, Coquillard, Taylor

1820 — 1829

The town grew out of the fur trade, and kept its shape: The first permanent settler at the bend was Pierre Frieschutz Navarre, an educated Frenchman who arrived in 1820 as an agent of John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company and built his cabin and trading post on the river near what is now downtown — the cabin site is preserved and the restored cabin is kept as the oldest building memory of the settlement. Navarre traded with the Potawatomi of the valley for the rest of the decade and is remembered as the first white man to make a permanent home in what is now St. Joseph County.

The founder, by the record's general consent, was the second man. Alexis Coquillard — energetic, forceful, and in business for himself — passed through in 1823, persuaded his father-in-law Francis Comparet to join him and invest a sum the Writers' Project guide gives as approximating $75,000 in buying the American Fur Company's agency for the upper lakes region, and in 1824 returned with his family and built the trading post he named the Big St. Joseph Station, to distinguish it from a post his relatives ran on the Little St. Joseph near Fort Wayne. In 1827 a competitor arrived and stayed: Lathrop Minor Taylor, who opened a post for Samuel Hanna and Company of Fort Wayne — in whose records the settlement appears as "St. Joseph's, Indiana." Coquillard and Taylor, rivals and partners by turns, became the settlement's leading men: they encouraged settlers with gifts of money and land, ran ferries, and laid the town's foundations between them. In 1829 they applied together for a post office. Taylor was made postmaster, and the office was designated Southold — addressed, in the postal geography of the day, to Allen County, Indiana. The name lasted about a year: in 1830, there being other Southolds to confuse it with, the Post Office Department renamed the office for what the place already called itself — South Bend.

Sources:

1. Indiana Writers' Project, Indiana: A Guide to the Hoosier State (1941) — Navarre's 1820 arrival and cabin, Coquillard's 1823 agency purchase with Comparet, the Big St. Joseph Station name, and the 1829–1830 post office names.
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica, "South Bend" — Navarre's 1820 American Fur Company post and restored cabin; Coquillard and Comparet's purchase three years later.
3. City of South Bend reference history — Coquillard's passage in 1823 and return with his family in 1824; Taylor's 1827 post for Samuel Hanna and Company and the "St. Joseph's" usage in Hanna's records; the Southold designation and the 1830 change to South Bend.