A town on the Michigan Road

1835 — 1850

For its first fifteen years South Bend was a road town: The Michigan Road — the state highway authorized under a federal grant of 1828, its right-of-way through Potawatomi country secured by the treaty of 1826, and built north from Indianapolis through the settlement in the 1830s — ran down what is now Michigan Street, and it made the town: stagecoaches, freight wagons, emigrant families and land-lookers passed through the bend on the way between the Ohio River and Lake Michigan, and inns, stores and land offices lived off the traffic. West of town lay the Kankakee Marsh, a vast wet prairie that blocked farming and bred fevers; its taming was the era's other great project, and when the state began dredging and straightening the Kankakee River in 1884 to drain it — the county's own farm-making work, in St. Joseph and the counties west — the marsh became some of the richest black-soil farmland in the state.

South Bend in these decades also floated on its river. The St. Joseph's channel was accounted navigable from its mouth to the bend, and the trade down it was a working system by 1831, when the first keelboat was built at South Bend and regular keelboat service began — long, shallow craft, poled and rowed, carrying 300 to 500 barrels down the 96 winding miles to the lake harbor at St. Joseph and bringing merchandise back up. Arks — roofed flatboats, broken up for lumber at their destination — ran the spring and fall rises. Steam came to the river in 1833, when steamboats began working the lower St. Joseph and towing the keelboats up in strings; by 1847 a local count found four steamboats and numerous other craft hauling produce on the river, and until 1852 the boats supplied South Bend's merchants with a great share of their merchandise. It was the commerce the railroad arrived, that year, to kill.

The town the first federal census of the region describes was still small: 1,652 people in 1850, in a county of farmers and a town of merchants, lawyers, millers and tradesmen serving them. But the ingredients of the factory city were already assembled on the riverbank: a county seat, a state road, a water power about to be dammed, and — arrived in 1842 — a college on the mission land north of town. The 1840s gave South Bend its two permanent engines: the river's fall, harnessed, and Notre Dame. The next two entries take them in turn.

Sources:

1. Indiana Historical Bureau, "The Story of the Michigan Road" — the 1826 treaty cession for the road's right-of-way and the road's construction through the Potawatomi country.
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica, "South Bend" — the Michigan Road laid down nearby in the settlement's first years.
3. City of South Bend reference history — the Kankakee dredging begun in 1884 to create farmland, and the town's early growth around the road and the river trade.
4. U.S. Census Bureau, decennial censuses — South Bend, 1,652 in 1850.
5. Indiana Magazine of History — "The Influence of River Transportation on St. Joseph and Elkhart Counties, 1830–1860," and "The Indiana Scene in the 1840's": the navigable channel to South Bend, the first keelboat built at South Bend in 1831 and regular keelboat service from that year, steamboats in use on the river from 1833, four steamboats at work by 1847, and the river supplying the town's merchants until 1852.