The peoples of the factory city

1858 — 1930

The factories ran on immigrants, and the immigrants built a second city of parishes: The first waves were Irish and German — St. Patrick's parish, founded in 1858 by Irish and German immigrants, calls itself to this day the Mother Parish of South Bend. From the 1870s the Poles came in the largest numbers of any group, leaving Congress Poland for the Oliver, Singer and Studebaker works and settling the city's west side: their St. Stanislaus Fraternal Aid Society was organized on September 27, 1874, and in 1877 the Reverend Valentine Czyzewski, a Polish priest of the Congregation of Holy Cross, founded St. Hedwig's — the first Polish church in South Bend and, by the parish histories, the second in Indiana, and in St. Hedwig's own words the Mother Parish of the Polish Community of South Bend. St. Casimir's followed on the south side in 1899. By 1900 there were over 12,000 Poles in the city; by 1930 the Polish-American population exceeded 35,000, in neighborhoods that clustered, parish by parish, around their churches. Hungarians came in the new century to the Oliver works and the southwest side, building their own parishes and halls; Belgians settled chiefly across the line in Mishawaka, and their story belongs to that city's record. The Polish city inside the city endures in the Dyngus Day celebrations of Easter Monday — a South Bend civic institution, and traditionally the day the city's election campaign season opens.

Black South Bend is as old as the factory city and older. Olivet African Methodist Episcopal Church was founded in March 1870 — the city's first African American church, still an active congregation — when the Black community numbered in the dozens. The industrial boom and the Great Migration drew Black workers north to the same factory gates, and the community grew with the century. In 1923, by the account preserved in the city's modern histories, a Black soda-fountain owner in South Bend received a letter signed "KKK" threatening to kill a Black man then held in the city jail and to harm the city's Black population — and within days more than a thousand of the city's Black residents had fled. The flight of 1923 opens the next entry but one; the communities themselves, parish by parish and decade by decade, are kept in the Communities and Black History sections of this record.

The newest layer of the same story arrived late in the factory age and grew through its decline: Spanish-speaking families, drawn first by the same industrial work and then by family and community of their own. The census series measures it — Hispanic or Latino residents were 8.5 percent of the city in 2000, 13.0 percent in 2010, and 16.7 percent in 2020, the fastest-growing of the city's communities while the city itself was shrinking — and the west-side map that Czyzewski's Poles drew now carries Spanish-language parishes and businesses in the same streets.

Sources:

1. St. Patrick Parish and St. Hedwig Parish, South Bend — the parishes' own mission statements: St. Patrick founded 1858 by Irish and German Catholic immigrants, "Mother Parish of South Bend"; St. Hedwig "founded by Polish immigrants in 1877," "Mother Parish of the Polish Community of South Bend."
2. Congregation of Holy Cross, "Stories of Holy Cross" — Czyzewski's 1877 assignment, over 12,000 Poles in South Bend by 1900, St. Casimir's opening in 1899, and over 35,000 Polish-Americans by 1930 in parish-clustered neighborhoods.
3. Fifty Years at Saint Adalbert's Parish (parish jubilee volume) — the Polish settlement of the west side from the 1870s and the Oliver, Singer and Studebaker work that drew it.
4. Olivet AME Church and city references — the church's founding in March 1870 as the city's first African American church.
5. City of South Bend reference history — the 1923 Klan letter and the flight of more than a thousand Black residents, as carried in the city's modern histories (the fuller record belongs to the black-history section).
6. U.S. Census Bureau, decennial censuses 2000–2020 — the Hispanic or Latino share of the city: 8.45 percent in 2000, 12.96 percent in 2010, 16.67 percent in 2020.
7. communities and black-history sections, this record — the peoples of the city in full.