South Bend, Indiana
Timeline
1,373 dated events, in order. Each gives the passage that dates it and a link to its full account.
The first 201 dated events are on this page. Scroll to load the next decades, or open 1870s and later decades directly.
Before 1700 5 dated mentions
- 1679La Salle's passage: December 1679
The voyage: René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, came to this river in the late fall of 1679 by water, from the lake.
- 1679La Salle at the portage, 1679 and 1681
The first European name in the record is a traveller passing through: In December 1679 René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, came up the St. Joseph River from its mouth — where he had built a small fort at the lake — with a party in eight canoes, looking for the portage the Native peoples of the river had described to him.
- 1679–1718The Town at the Portage: A Place the Record Cannot Fix
The documented facts: When the written record of this ground opens, in December 1679, La Salle's party came up the river of the Miamis to a town of the Miami people near the carrying place — the portage from the St. Joseph to the headwaters of the Kankakee.
- 1679–1721The Parkovash: buffalo on the river, and the ox-head of Portage Prairie
The earliest dated animal record of the portage: When La Salle, lost on the portage in December 1679, finally came down the St. Joseph River to his party, the county history's account of the episode has him arriving "with the opossums hanging from his belt"…
- 1679–1831The Mission Era: Priests on the St. Joseph River, 1679-1831
On 3 December 1679 Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, set out up the river then called the River of the Miamis, and his party found and crossed the St. Joseph-Kankakee portage, whose landing lay about two miles below the present limits of South Bend.
18th century 3 dated mentions
1720s
- 1721Ox-Head Prairie, named for a head of monstrous size
Charlevoix, camped on the portage on 17 September 1721, named Ox-Head Prairie for "the head of an ox of monstrous size" found there.
1730s
- 1738The opposition: what the churches and the critics said
The Church had condemned Freemasonry by name since Clement XII's bull In Eminenti of 1738; Leo XIII's encyclical Humanum Genus of 1884 renewed the condemnation for the fraternal age; and the Church's 1917 Code of Canon Law, canon 2335, attached excommunication to Catholic membership in Masonic and similar societies.
1770s
- 1779–1820The traders before the bend had a post: Burnett's valley
William Burnett, a New Jersey man of American sympathies, entered the St. Joseph valley sometime between 1779 and 1782 — the years vary across the accounts, and the scholarly study of his trade, Susan Sleeper-Smith's "St. Joseph Trade from Burnett to Taylor," carries the range…
19th century 193 dated mentions
1810s
- 1810–1882John D. DeFrees: the printer who started the city's press — and Colfax
John Dougherty DeFrees (1810–1882): the man who brought printing to northern Indiana and, with it, the region's political class.
- 1816–1881The law over their heads · the Black Laws, Article XIII, and the register that does not survive
The framework the community lived under: Indiana's first constitution, in 1816, banned slavery outright, and the ban was never the whole of the law.
- 1818Commitment: the law's local course
An act of 1818 empowered the circuit courts to conduct inquests into cases of suspected insanity and to appoint guardians for persons adjudged insane; later acts gave the courts the power to commit such persons to the state hospitals.
1820s
- 1820The fur traders: Navarre, Coquillard, Taylor
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…
- 1820The French of the trading town
The town's first settler community was French: Pierre Frieschutz Navarre, who established his post at the bend in 1820, and Alexis Coquillard, who built the trading house, the mill race ambitions and the town plat itself, headed a French and French-Canadian trading community…
- 1820–1865The traders: the men the town grew on
An educated French-Canadian in the service of John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company, Navarre came up the St. Joseph River in 1820 and established the first trading post at the south bend of the river, on land that was still, in law and in fact, Potawatomi land — the county record's "1820…
- 1820–todayThe Pioneer Stock — the Navarre Cabin and What Survives of the First City
Pierre Freischutz Navarre, an agent of John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company who came from Monroe, Michigan, built his cabin and trading post in 1820 on the north bank of the St. Joseph River, at what is now 123 West North Shore Drive, sited for the river, the Kankakee and the portage between them.
- 1821The county asylum: the poorhouse and its insane charges
The act of 1821 that provided for houses for the employment of the poor opened the county asylums to the insane as well — the county's own historical timeline of its county home states it in so many words — and in St. Joseph County the commissioners began, in 1831, by renting houses in South Bend for the destitute.
- 1822The French century upriver: Fort St. Joseph and the missions
Isaac McCoy, a Baptist missionary, founded Carey Mission in 1822 on the river near the old fort — a school and mission to the valley's Potawatomi, Michigan ground again, printed here because the treaty that ceded the Indiana valley was negotiated at "the Missionary Establishments upon the St. Joseph" six years later.
- 1822Rum Village: the name that outlived the village
Rum Village is the oldest named neighborhood ground in the city, and the only one whose name is a chief's: the Potawatomi village of Chief Torum — "Rum," in the rendering the record carries — stood on the ground southwest of the present downtown, north of West Ewing Avenue and west of South Main Street…
- 1822–todayRum Village: The Drink That Never Named It
The paper trail runs early: the missionary Isaac McCoy conversed with the village's people in the spring of 1822; the Keating expedition of 1824 saw Torum's village and its cornfields…
- 1823–1831Alexis Coquillard: the last of the traders
The accounts divide on the season of his settling, and the file prints the division: The Story of South Bend (1920) has him come to the post in 1823, aged twenty-eight, and buy out the business Navarre had established the following year…
- 1823–1885Schuyler Colfax: the city's vice president
Schuyler Colfax (1823–1885): South Bend's highest-reaching son, and the fullest political life this section holds.
- 1823–1885Schuyler Colfax — Speaker of the House, Vice President of the United States
He was born in New York City on March 23, 1823. His family moved west to New Carlisle, Indiana, in 1836, when he was thirteen, and in 1841 he moved to South Bend, where his stepfather, George W. Matthews, had become auditor of St. Joseph County and took the young man on as his deputy — a post Colfax held for some eight years.
- 1823–1987The Olivers: the plow, the presidency, and Copshaholm
James Oliver (1823–1908): the inventor. Born on 28 August 1823 at Newcastleton, Scotland, Oliver came to America in 1835, and in May 1855 bought a quarter interest in a South Bend foundry.
- 1826–1830The Michigan Road: the treaty strip and the survey
The road was bought with land before it was built with money: The Michigan Road — the state road from Madison on the Ohio River to Michigan City on Lake Michigan, by way of Indianapolis and South Bend…
- 1826–1833The taking, instrument by instrument: 1826, 1828, 1832, 1833
1826 — what Mississinewa did and did not take: The treaty line for this ground opens at the mouth of the Mississinewa on 16 October 1826 (7 Stat.
- 1826–1966The Studebakers: five brothers, a dead president, and the two who saved it
Henry Studebaker (1826–1895) and Clement Studebaker (1831–1901) opened the blacksmith shop at Michigan and Jefferson streets on 16 February 1852 on 68 dollars of capital.
- 1829–1830The Rumpus Over the Name: How South Bend Stayed South Bend
The documented core: the place's first post office, applied for in 1829, went onto the federal books as Southold — addressed, in the postal geography of the day, to Allen County, Indiana.
1830s
- 1830A county, and a county seat that had to be moved
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.
- 1830Badin's mission and the band that stayed
The oldest institution in South Bend began as a mission to the people about to be dispossessed: In 1830 the Reverend Stephen Badin — the first Catholic priest ordained in the United States — bought 524 acres a mile north of the settlement, around two small lakes, and founded there the mission of St. Mary of the Lakes, Ste.
- 1830The series in full: city and county, census by census, 1830–2020
The whole table: St. Joseph County was organized in 1830 and counted that year; South Bend was not separately returned until 1850, so the city series opens then.
- 1830The eras of growth, read off the numbers
St. Joseph County went from 287 people in 1830 to 10,954 in 1850 and 33,178 in 1880, as the land sales, the river trade and the first farms drew settlers to the bend of the St. Joseph.
- 1830–1831The Survey and the Plat
By act of the General Assembly approved 29 January 1830, St. Joseph County was formed — with Elkhart County in the same act — its organized existence to run from 1 April 1830; on 27 August 1830 the county organized itself at the house of Alexis Coquillard, the justices sworn with L. M. Taylor, the trader, as the county's first clerk.
- 1830–1831The First Public Ground: The Plat's Public Square
When Lathrop M. Taylor, Alexis Coquillard and their associates bid for the county seat in 1830, the bonds they gave the county commissioners conveyed the town's numbered lots to the county's use, together with lots for religious societies and school purposes and four acres for a public graveyard…
- 1830–1837Building the road: commissioners, scrip and the South Bend land sale
The state built the road the way it paid for everything in 1830 — on land and on credit: The act of 29 January 1830 set the road's physical terms: opened one hundred feet wide, grubbed clear for thirty feet down the center.
- 1830–1860The First Courts, the First Sheriff, and a Jail of Hewn Oak
St. Joseph County was organized by act of the General Assembly dated January 29, 1830, effective April 1, 1830, and its first seat of justice sat briefly on William Brookfield's farm southwest of the bend before the commissioners settled the seat at South Bend on September 7, 1831.
- 1830–todayPokagon's band: the exception that held
In August 1830 Father Stephen Badin arrived in the valley to raise the Catholic mission Pokagon's people had asked for; the Catholic Potawatomi of southwest Michigan and northwest Indiana acknowledged Pokagon as their leader, and he himself was baptized in 1833.
- 1831The crossings: a succession of bridges at each site
The first crossing was a ferry, and it stood where La Salle Avenue stands: The crossing place at old Water Street, now La Salle Avenue, is one of the first spots where the river was crossed in this area; in 1831 Nehemiah B. Griffith received the first ferry license there.
- 1831The dam and the races
In 1831 Coquillard and Taylor claimed the river's water rights on both banks — the future West Race on their side of the island divide and the East Race across it.
- 1831The original plat: a polygon of quarter-acre lots
The city began as a speculation with 408 lots: Alexis Coquillard and Lathrop M. Taylor, who between them had come to own the townsite ground, laid out the town of South Bend on 8 March 1831 and recorded the plat that month.
- 1831Lathrop M. Taylor — the second founder
The founding act: Lathrop Minor Taylor is the second name on the town's founding instrument: with Coquillard he bought the townsite when the cessions made it buyable and platted South Bend in 1831.
- 1831The County Home: Public Poor Relief and Portage Manor
In 1831 the county commissioners began renting houses in South Bend for the destitute, and through the nineteenth century the system's two arms were the township trustees, who gave temporary relief to people in their homes, and the county poor farm, which took those who could not be kept at home.
- 1831Newspapers and media: a press town from the first sheet
Its first newspaper was printed in 1831, when the settlement was a trading post on the St. Joseph River, and for the next century and a half the city's public business ran through its papers: a Whig register that made a Speaker of the House, a Democratic line that ran from 1853 to 1938 under five names, a Polish…
- 1831The tavern era: the road's houses and the town's first licensed rooms
Its headlines belong here at pointer size: Peter Johnson's Michigan Hotel, at Michigan and Washington streets, opened in 1831 — a hewed-log house lit by tallow dips that took the road's wagon trade and, by tradition, hosted General Winfield Scott on his Black Hawk War march in 1832…
- 1831–1834The first paper: the North-Western Pioneer and St. Joseph's Intelligencer
Its first number was issued on Wednesday, 16 November 1831, by two brothers, John D. and Joseph H. Defrees.
- 1831–1836The stands: the Michigan Hotel and Earl's Tavern
It was erected by Peter Johnson, who came up from Logansport early in 1831, in the road-building season itself, ferrying the Tippecanoe and Yellow rivers on Indian canoes because the ice was rotten.
- 1831–1865The frame: a town of trustees, then a city
The plat and the county seat: South Bend was laid out in 1831 — the town plat recorded that March — as the seat of the new St. Joseph County, on land the fur traders Alexis Coquillard and Lathrop M. Taylor had bought and platted at the southernmost bend of the St. Joseph River.
- 1831–1911The working river: keelboats, steamboats, and the lock that leaked
Canoes had carried the fur trade for a century and a half before him; the organized freight business begins in 1831, when Peter Johnson, a South Bend carpenter, bought a French trader's pirogue at Niles, split it lengthwise, and rebuilt it as the keelboat Fairplay…
- 1831–1956The Enforcement Line: Sheriffs, Marshals, and Chiefs
The county's enforcement began with its sheriff — Samuel L. Cottrell, appointed 1831 — and the city's with its marshal.
- 1831–2026The police: constables, marshals, and the uniformed department
The department's own published history begins its line with constables appointed in 1831, the year the town was platted as county seat, and dates the name South Bend Police Department to 1903.
- 1832The Black Hawk War · minute men, a stockade, and the "bloody three hundred"
The county's first war was a fright that never arrived — and its record survives in a participant's own telling: When Black Hawk's war broke out in 1832, South Bend raised a company and built a fort.
- 1832–1833The first court — Chapman's fifth chapter read first-hand: the first term, the first indictment
The first session of the Circuit Court was held on the 22d day of October, 1832, at the tavern of Calvin Lilley in the village of South Bend, Hon. John R. Porter presiding.
- 1832–1907The Old Settlers' Stock: The Stories Howard Collected
Of the spring of 1832 he says: “In 1832 the report of the uprising of the northwestern Indians spread like wildfire.
- 1832–1978The other state roads: the Vistula Road and the Chicago Road
An act of February 1832 appointed commissioners "to survey, mark and locate a road from South Bend… by way of the mouth of the Elkhart River… and the county seat of Lagrange County to the east line of this State, in the direction of Vistula (now Toledo)"; the legislature named the line but, unlike the Michigan Road's act, fixed no width.
- 1832–todayThe military ground of City Cemetery
The ground: City Cemetery, at 214 North Elm Street, is South Bend's oldest cemetery, founded in 1832 on land given by the town's founders, and its National Register nomination carries the cemetery's military record whole.
- 1832–todayThe Courthouse Square — Three Courthouses, One of Them Moved
The first courthouse (1833): In January 1832 the St. Joseph County commissioners voted to build a courthouse, and on 7 February they accepted Peter Johnson's proposal to build it for $6,000.
- 1834First Presbyterian Church: Organized May 3, 1834
The church itself was organized three years later: on May 3, 1834, families, husbands and wives with their children, met in the house of Horatio Chapin, on Michigan Street near LaSalle Avenue, to form the pioneer church.
- 1834–todayThe road through South Bend: Michigan Street and Michigan Avenue
This section of the road was finished in 1834 and 1835." The street names are the survival: the road's name is on the city's main north–south street because the road is under it.
- 1835–1842The New York purchase and the panic
The water power was first developed by men who never lived here: In 1835 Alexis Coquillard sold the water power at the bend to a company of New Yorkers — Joseph Fellows, Garrett V. Dennison, Thomas W. Alcott, James McKower, William J. Worth and John Van Buren, as the 1880 county history prints their names.
- 1836The Eagle Hotel and the Rate War of 1837
Russ held the tavern license at the May term of 1836 and again at the September term of 1837. The house kept about twenty boarders, canal and race men among them — the labor of the dam and race works lodging by the week — and its rate is the first hotel price the South Bend record preserves: three dollars for board and lodging.
- 1836–1842The first manufactures, before the dam
The first factory building in South Bend made nothing: The 1880 county history is blunt about the ordering of the town's industrial life — the first building erected for manufacturing purposes was the "old glass house" of 1836, a frame about sixty by eighty feet with a wing, built near the crossing of Division and…
- 1836–1877The insurance record: two mutuals
In 1836, Howard's county history records, leading citizens of the town took a prominent part in organizing the first insurance company of St. Joseph County, the St. Joseph County Mutual Fire Insurance Company, chartered by an act approved in February 1837 (Local Laws of 1837, p. 211).
- 1836–1887The Free Press and the St. Joseph Valley Register: Colfax's paper
The second paper: The Free Press was established in 1836 by William Millikan and ran, in the 1907 history's words, "fairly successful for a time; but after nine years was discontinued."
- 1836–1938The earlier papers, and the News-Times
The first papers: Brown's chronology gives the county its first newspaper in 1831 — the Western Pioneer and St. Joseph Intelligencer The documented line runs clearer from 1836: the South Bend Free Press (1836–1845 in the Library of Congress's newspaper directory, succeeding the St. Joseph Beacon and Indiana & Michigan…
- 1837Lowell: the town across the river
South Bend's second plat was a separate town, laid out to rival it: Alexis Coquillard sold a considerable amount of his East Bank land to Christopher W. Emrick, who laid out the original plat of the town of Lowell in 1837, as the East Bank multiple property documentation tells it.
- 1837The towns the city absorbed: Lowell and River Park
Two of South Bend's neighborhoods were once towns of their own: Lowell, on the river's east bank, was laid out in 1837 and named for Lowell, Massachusetts; its ground — between Washington Street and Cedar Street — held, from 1847, the land of St. Joseph's parish, the city's first.
- 1837Two Small Houses: The Traveler's Rest and the Franklin House
Benjamin Wall took his license at the November term of 1837 for the southeast corner of Michigan and Jefferson streets.
- 1837–1901Lowell and the East Bank: the factory village on the east race
The east race got a mill village of its own, named for the mill city of Massachusetts: In 1837 Christopher W. Emrick platted Lowell on land bought from Coquillard along the east bank, and named it for Lowell, Massachusetts — the planned textile city that was then the wonder of American manufacturing.
- 1837–1916Timothy Edward Howard: the historian who was also a justice
Timothy Edward Howard (1837–1916): the man whose two-volume History of St. Joseph County, Indiana The judicial sweep found him where the Indiana Supreme Court keeps its own: in the court's official biographical sketches.
- 1838–1843The removal of the rest: 1838 and 1840
The deadline in that disputed treaty passed on 5 August 1838. Governor David Wallace authorized General John Tipton to remove the band by force; on 29–30 August Tipton's hundred volunteer militia surrounded the Twin Lakes village, and the registration rolls recorded 859 people.
- 1838–1858The State Bank of Indiana's South Bend branch — the first bank
A public meeting was held on 22 February 1838, and that summer the branch's stock was sold: the subscription books opened on 2 July 1838 under commissioners Alexis Coquillard, Lathrop M. Taylor and John Grant — the fur trader and the town's co-founder among them…
- 1838–1933The nineteenth century · a blank page, and the quiet decades after
No case: South Bend had banks from the State Bank of Indiana's branch, located here in 1838, through the national charters of 1863 and after, and the county's historians chronicled those banks in detail — their charters, officers, corners and failures.
- 1838–1941The founding bankers — Stanfield, Seixas, Brownfield, Blanchard, and the rest
The branch era: South Bend's first bank was secured, not founded in the modern sense: Dr. John A. Henricks, Thomas D. Baird and George Crawford worked to land a branch of the State Bank of Indiana, and when the branch's stock was sold in the summer of 1838 the subscription books opened under commissioners Alexis…
- 1839–1900The first families of record · settlement under the Black Laws
The first permanent Black resident of South Bend is believed to be Peter Coleman , who settled in the city in 1839 .
- 1839–1907Emma Barrett Molloy: the editor who argued for the ballot
Emma Barrett Molloy (1839–1907): born in South Bend in 1839, and the city’s first suffrage voice in print.
- 1839–1907Emma Barrett Molloy: the editor who argued for the ballot
Emma Barrett Molloy (1839–1907): born in South Bend in 1839, and the city's first suffrage voice in print.
1840s
- 1840St. Joseph Lodge No. 45: the first secret society in South Bend
Masons were therefore meeting in South Bend under authority from 1840, a decade after the town was laid out and nineteen years before it was a city.
- 1840From the Exchange to the Sheridan: The Hotel at Michigan and LaSalle
In 1840 William L. Earl, the Michigan Hotel's licensee of 1834, erected a hotel on the corner. Its names in course map the century's lodging fashions: the Exchange first — it was Benj.
- 1840–1860The antebellum Black community · counted in the census, named in the record
The census counted nine Black residents of St. Joseph County in 1840 and twenty-nine in 1850 — eighteen of them in South Bend itself, on the city count the Landmark Tour carries.
- 1840–1899The station claims, tested one by one · what the tradition says, and what carries it
"The residents of the vicinity of South Bend known to have been abolitionists and contributors to the Underground Railroad during the years 1840–1850, inclusive," Windle's compilation lists as Leander B. Newton, Edward B. Crocker, Almond Bugbee, Thomas B. Bulla, William F. Bulla, Eliakim Briggs, Solomon W. Palmer…
- 1840–2019The Tribune family: five generations of Millers and Schurzes
Alfred Bryant Miller (1840–1892) and Elmer Crockett (1844–1907): the founders. Miller was born in South Bend in 1840, the son of Benjamin Franklin Miller, an abolitionist newspaperman whose Cincinnati presses Kentucky slave owners had once thrown into the river and who ended in the printing trade in South Bend.
- 1840–todayThe statehouse line: South Bend in Indianapolis
The first of the line: The city's state service begins with John D. DeFrees — the printer-legislator whose profile stands in the People section — who sat in the Indiana House in 1840 and the Indiana Senate in 1842, the young town's voice in a young state's capital.
- 1841The county fair: societies, grounds, and the 4-H fair
Three fairs on four grounds, and the fourth still running: The fair begins with the county's first agricultural society, organized under the act of February 19, 1838: notice in the South Bend Free Press , an organizing meeting on June 12, 1841, with Samuel C. Sample president and F. R. Tutt secretary, John J. Deming…
- 1842The college at the lakes, in brief
The second engine arrived in the snow: On the afternoon of November 26, 1842, the Reverend Edward Sorin — a 28-year-old French priest of the Congregation of Holy Cross — reached South Bend with a party of Holy Cross brothers, lodged first at Coquillard's house, and rode out to the mission land at the lakes.
- 1842–1868The dam of 1844 and the two races
The system that powered the century was built by two companies, and the sources divide the credit differently: In December 1842 the South Bend Manufacturing Company was incorporated to develop the power on one side of the river, and the South Bend Hydraulic Company came to hold the other.
- 1843–1964The sisters: Holy Cross women and the work of the orders
The arrival: the Sisters of the Holy Cross came to this ground in 1843, four sisters from France — Sister Mary of the Heart of Jesus, aged nineteen; Sister Mary of Bethlehem, forty-five; Sister Mary of Calvary, twenty-five; Sister Mary of Nazareth, twenty-one, in Notre Dame Magazine's account…
- 1844The dam of 1844, as a work in the river
One dam crosses the river inside this city, and it has been there since 1844: The power system the dam headed — the east and west races, the mills that lined them, the Oliver hydro plant, the gathering of the rights into a single utility, the filling of the East Race about 1954…
- 1844The Disciples of Christ: The Christian Church, 1844 and 1851
The country organization: The Christian Church of South Bend was first organized in the summer of 1844, four miles north of the city, with a membership of twelve.
- 1844–1859The abolitionist presence · nine men, three election tickets, and a hostile town
In 1844 James G. Birney, the Liberty candidate for president — Chapman's narrative calls his party, loosely, Free-Soil — polled 33 votes in this county , and Chapman pauses on the figure: it showed, even at that early day, a few who were not afraid of social ostracism on account of their opinions on slavery.
- 1845–1970Central High School
The land downtown was donated by Alexis Coquillard, the trader who co-founded the town, and the county seminary was completed on it in 1845.
- 1846The Odd Fellows: Lodge No. 29 and the Rebekah degree's author
Four years behind the Masons, and the city's own man wrote the women's degree: South Bend Lodge No. 29 of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows was chartered in 1846, the first lodge of its order here, meeting every Wednesday evening; Chapman prints its 1880 officers, George Ford as Noble Grand.
- 1846–1848The Mexican War · no company, thirteen named men
The Mexican War's thinness here is itself the documented fact — the same county that could not raise a company in 1846 sent its first company out within four days of Sumter in 1861.
- 1846–1913Father Czyzewski: the builder of Polish South Bend
The Rev. Valentine Czyzewski, C.S.C. (1846–1913): the priest who built the Polish west side's mother parish and, with it, much of Polish South Bend.
- 1847–1849The Powell case in the full record · two writs, a courtroom seizure, and a second discharge
On the night of Saturday, 9 October 1847 , the whole family disappeared. About forty persons started in pursuit the next morning, and Norris and a party in his employ hunted through southern Indiana for some two months, finding articles of the fugitives' clothing at several places, but not the family.
- 1847–1849The Courts as Arena: The Powell Habeas Case
In 1847 a Kentucky claimant's party under Norris, carrying the Powell family south as claimed property, was overtaken at South Bend by Wright Maudlin, a neighbor of the Powells, who found South Bend attorney Edwin B. Crocker to draft a writ of habeas corpus.
- 1847–1850The Powell case · a family seized, freed, and sued for
The city's brightest antebellum hour, and its price: David Powell and Lucy Powell fled John Norris, who claimed to own them, in northern Kentucky on the night of 9 October 1847 , with their four children — Lewis, Samuel, George and James — and settled at Cassopolis, Michigan.
- 1848Sent away: Indianapolis, then Logansport, and the Westville traffic
The county's committed went to other cities' hospitals: The state hospital era opened at Indianapolis: Indiana's first state hospital for the insane was enacted as early as 1827 but not built until 1848, and for forty years it was the destination of every county's commitments, this one among them.
- 1848–1907The Sunday News, the Post, and the rest of the 1907 survey
First by date is the Free Democrat of 1848, established by Dr. E. W. H. Ellis to champion the Free Soil movement, published for a few months and gone.
- 1849The Remaining Arrivals: Reformed, Evangelical, Brethren, and the Later Churches
The Reformed Church: The Reformed Church of South Bend was organized in 1849 by the Rev. David McNiesh. The brick church erected in that year at the corner of Lafayette Street and Colfax Avenue was occupied until about 1905, when a new building was erected in its place.
- 1849–1855The price of the rescue · Norris v. Newton, the penalty suits, and Norris v. Crocker in the Supreme Court
The damages action: On 21 December 1849 Norris commenced suit in the United States Circuit Court for the District of Indiana against nine men — Leander B. Newton, George W. Horton, Edwin B. Crocker, Solomon W. Palmer, David Jodon, William Willmington, Lot Day, Jr., Amable M. Lapiere and Wright Maudlin…
- 1849–1926The Catholic Schools: the Founding Generation
The brothers' extracts preserved in the Notre Dame archives show the intention early: in 1849 Sorin directed that Brother Gatian be sent into South Bend "as soon as possible to begin there a regular school, at least a French class."
1850s
- 1850The Black population series, 1850–2020
The census counted Black South Bend from the first city return, and for seventy years it counted a small community in an immigrant city: In 1850 the enumerators found 18 free Black residents in South Bend — Indiana law counted no enslaved people, and the census's own columns show all 18 as free — 1.1 percent of the town.
- 1850Joseph D. Oliver — the heir who ran it
He was born 20 August 1850 at Mishawaka, while the family still lived there, and began work in his father's firm at fourteen, cutting threads on nuts for seventy-five cents a day — a job he told a Tribune reporter in 1913 he had dreaded.
- 1850Kamm & Schellinger of Mishawaka, the region's second brewery
The register text for the Mishawaka plant states the founding: "the Kamm & Schellinger Brewery was established in 1850 by John Wagner, who built a small brewery about one mile east of the center of Mishawaka on the banks of the St. Joseph River."
- 1850–1852The first train: October 1851
The railroad came to the bend from the east, along the river towns: The Northern Indiana & Chicago Railroad was chartered on 30 November 1850 to build west from the Michigan Southern's line at the Indiana state line toward Chicago.
- 1851The railroad century opens
On October 4, 1851, the town's future changed gauge: The first steam locomotive entered South Bend that day on the Michigan Southern and Northern Indiana Railroad — soon folded into the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern — tying the bend by rail to Toledo, Chicago and the east.
- 1851The Germans: Arzberg's letters and the parish of St. Mary
The German community arrived by letter: between 1851 and 1854 some two hundred people — more than a tenth of the town — left Arzberg, in Bavaria, most of them for South Bend, drawn by the letters of those who had gone before…
- 1851The county fair: the great recurring gathering
Its institutional history — the agricultural societies of 1841, 1851, and 1881, the 4-H corporation, the charters and reorganizations — is told whole in Farms & Crops and is not repeated here.
- 1852Wagons and plows: the founding shops
Two small shops opened within three years of each other made the city: In February 1852, at the corner of Michigan and Jefferson in the little county-seat town, the brothers Henry and Clement Studebaker — blacksmiths, the younger a wagonmaker — opened the H. & C. Studebaker blacksmith and wagon shop.
- 1852The wagon trade: a continent first
The first export market was the West: The Studebaker works began in 1852 as a blacksmith shop that built two wagons in its first year, and the trade it built was outward from the start — westward, along the emigrant roads.
- 1852The five Studebaker brothers — the founding, divided
Henry Studebaker (1826–1895) and Clement Studebaker (1831–1901), sons of John and Rebecca Studebaker of Ashland County, Ohio, opened the blacksmith shop at Michigan and Jefferson streets on 16 February 1852 on $68 of capital, making metal parts for freight wagons and, within the year, complete wagons.
- 1852The fairgrounds: the ground racing grew out of
The county agricultural society held a fair at Mishawaka in the fall of 1852; in 1853 it leased, and then purchased, two acres on Washington Street in South Bend, and held its fairs there until 1857.
- 1852The Sixty-Eight Dollars and the Wagon That Ran Thirty-Three Years
The founding as the county history prints it: Howard's History (1907) states it in the sentence every telling since has quoted: “With sixty-eight dollars in cash and stock-in-trade, these two boys opened a blacksmith shop in South Bend” — Henry and Clement Studebaker, in February 1852, at Main and Jefferson.
- 1852The first brewer: the question, and the Muessel ground
When he reached South Bend, the nomination says, sources vary between 1852 and 1853, and the variance is printed here as the record gives it.
- 1852–1868H. & C. Studebaker: the $68 shop
The founding: Henry Studebaker (1826–1895) and Clement Studebaker (1831–1901), sons of John and Rebecca Studebaker of Ashland County, Ohio, and grandsons of a German wagon-making family that had arrived at Philadelphia from Rotterdam in 1736, opened a blacksmith shop at the corner of Michigan and Jefferson streets in…
- 1852–1872Washington Street, Portage Avenue, and Camp Rose
In the fall of 1852 the fair was held at Mishawaka, the people of the town paying all the expenses.
- 1852–1909The wagon works as a system
Carlisle sets the endpoints side by side: in 1852, two wagons built; in 1904, more than one hundred thousand vehicles of every description made and sold.
- 1852–1912The first sellers: the wagon maker's repositories
Henry and Clement Studebaker opened their blacksmith shop in South Bend on 16 February 1852 with sixty-eight dollars and two forges, and as the wagon works grew, the company sold through repositories: company repositories in the great cities and selling agencies in the towns.
- 1852–1936The breweries, as businesses — a cross-reference
Christopher Muessel began brewing in South Bend in 1852 and built one of the city's substantial nineteenth-century industries; the Muessel Brewing Company was incorporated in 1893, and Prohibition closed the works about 1922.
- 1852–todayThe second rank, in brief — and the gaps this record names
Christopher Muessel began brewing in South Bend in 1852 and built one of the city's substantial nineteenth-century industries; the Muessel Brewing Company was incorporated in 1893, and the brewery record whole…
- 1853–1858Wheelbarrow Johnny
The tale: John Mohler Studebaker went west in 1853, to Hangtown — Placerville, California — and the story the family and the company told of him ever after is the wheelbarrow.
- 1853–1886The bucket town and the volunteer companies
The city's present fire department page states that "the area's first organized fire protection entity commenced operations on January 29, 1853, twelve years before the incorporation of the city," and the department counted itself 154 years old in 2007, which counts from 1853.
- 1853–1938The Times line and the News-Times: the Democratic paper, 1853–1938
The other line: The Tribune 's great rival began as the St. Joseph County Forum , started in 1853 by Ariel Euclid Drapier and his son William H. Drapier…
- 1853–todayThe fire chiefs
The department's own count: The fire department dated itself in 2007 at a hundred and fifty-four years — a founding in 1853 — while Edythe Brown's 1920 table of South Bend firsts gives "1855 — First Fire Department, Volunteer."
- 1854Denniston & Fellows, and Taylor's Field: the near south side
The city's near south side was platted in three campaigns over forty years: the middle of it first — the plat of Joseph Fellows and Hugh Denniston, laid out in 1854 between Fellows Street and Carroll Street, which a district of thirty-five frame dwellings filled by the time of the 1885 Sanborn map.
- 1854–1907The Founding Generation — One Faculty in Many Buildings
St. Joseph Grade School dates to 1854, with the Sisters of the Holy Cross teaching in the city from that year — the sisters’ arrival and the school’s founding are one event in the record.
- 1855James Oliver and Harvey Little — the foundry quarter-shares
He learned iron work in Indiana, and in May 1855 he and a fellow molder, Harvey Little, each bought a one-fourth interest in a small South Bend foundry that cast iron plows.
- 1855The York Rite: Chapter No. 29, Commandery No. 13, Council No. 82
South Bend Chapter No. 29, Royal Arch Masons, was instituted in 1855 — before South Bend Lodge, before Germania Lodge, when St. Joseph Lodge stood nearly alone — and met the second Monday of the month; Chapman prints Elmer Crockett as its High Priest in 1880.
- 1855–1884John Clarkson Birdsell and the huller fight that reached the Supreme Court
John Clarkson Birdsell, working at West Henrietta, New York, took Letters Patent No. 20,249 on 18 May 1858 for his improvement in machines for threshing and hulling clover seed — the local account of a first patent in December 1855 stands beside it in the Businesses entry, and the patent of record is the 1858 grant, reissued in 1862.
- 1855–1959The federal line I: from Colfax to the war generation
Colfax, cross-referenced: Schuyler Colfax — congressman 1855–1869, Speaker of the House, Vice President of the United States — is the summit of the line and is profiled at full size in the People section, including the Crédit Mobilier end of his career.
- 1855–1985Oliver Chilled Plow Works — the plow that broke the prairie
He learned iron work in Indiana, and in May 1855 he and a fellow molder, Harvey Little, each bought a one-fourth interest in a small South Bend foundry that cast iron plows.
- 1857The Bank of South Bend — the free bank
Suspension and closure: The Federal Reserve–derived record of nineteenth-century bank suspensions carries the bank twice: it suspended on 10 January 1855 and reopened, and it suspended again on 9 July 1857 — the summer the panic of 1857 was building — and that suspension ended in closure.
- 1857The plowmaker to the world
A plow that crossed every ocean: James Oliver's chilled plow, patented from this ground in 1857, became the city's second great export good.
- 1857The Diocese of Fort Wayne–South Bend
Erection: On 8 January 1857, Pope Pius IX erected the Diocese of Fort Wayne from territory of the Diocese of Vincennes, which had covered the whole of Indiana since 1834.
- 1857–1873James Oliver and the chilled plow: the patent of 30 June 1857
The patent: The document on which South Bend's inventive record stands is Letters Patent No. 17,694, "Improvement in Chilling Plowshares," granted 30 June 1857 — and its face names two inventors, not one: James Oliver and Harvey Little, the fellow molder who had bought into the South Bend foundry beside him in May 1855.
- 1858The peoples of the factory city
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.
- 1858Draining the wet prairies and the Kankakee edge
The valley's drainage history, as the Kankakee Valley Historical Society and Fay Folsom Nichols's river history give it, runs: the first real drainage ditch in 1858…
- 1858The Irish and the mother parish on Taylor Street
South Bend's Irish built the city's first parish: St. Patrick's, at 309 South Taylor Street on the near west side, was founded in 1858 by Irish and German immigrants together…
- 1858–1861The first pictures: a daguerreian on Michigan Street, 1858–1861
The first name: The earliest photographer the record reached working in South Bend is C. A. Stover, listed in Craig's Daguerreian Registry as a daguerreian and ambrotypist here from 1858 to 1861.
- 1858–1864The Bank of the State of Indiana — the successor branch
The South Bend branch's charter was obtained on 3 March 1855, three years before it was needed, with capital of $150,000, and when the old branch closed in 1858 the new one took its place in the same banking room at Michigan and Colfax.
- 1858–1866The First Murder Trials
Navarre built at the bend in 1820; the county's first murder indictment in the histories came in 1858. What follows is Chapman's chapter, read first-hand, with each case's disposition as the court record gave it to him.
- 1859The Springbrook wreck · the night the railroad killed its passengers
The young city's first catastrophe came on its proudest work: Eight years after the first train reached South Bend, the Michigan Southern's Night Express , running from Chicago to Toledo with some 150 passengers, plunged into the Springbrook ravine between Mishawaka and South Bend just before midnight on 27 June 1859.
- 1859–1938The wrecks the record keeps
Three wrecks stand in the documentary record of South Bend's railroads, and they are printed here at the record's size — the offenses, if any, belong to Crime History, and the first of them stands also in Major Events: The great early disaster came on 27 June 1859, eight years after the first train.
1860s
- 1860–1861The approach of war · a pointer
On the eve: The antebellum record closes where the census of 1860 leaves it: a county of 18,455 people, eighty-eight of them Black, living under a constitution that forbade their coming and a community that had tripled anyway; a courthouse that had heard the fugitive question argued to discharge, twice, eleven years before…
- 1860–1867William Gibson: a photographer of 1860, on both sides of the city line
The career: William Gibson learned photography in 1860 — so his sketch in Chapman's 1880 county history says, at pages 915–916; the sketch does not name the town where he learned, a gap the Indiana Photographers Project itself flags, though the biographies around his are South Bend men.
- 1861The first company, and the first martyr · the 9th Indiana's three-months men
The first company left from the Lake Shore depot on Friday, 19 April 1861, four days after the courthouse meeting: Chapman calls it "the first volunteer company from Northern Indiana to take up its line of march."
- 1861The militia tradition · the county answers, April 1861
On 15 April 1861, three days after Fort Sumter, a mass meeting filled the courthouse at South Bend, and the county began raising companies.
- 1861–1864The 15th Indiana · thirty-eight of the county's men
The 15th's county companies left a complete little ledger of loss: St. Joseph County men served in the 15th Indiana from its organization in 1861 — Company B's papers survive among the county's Civil War records at the Notre Dame Archives, order books and morning reports included.
- 1861–1865The Civil War at home · the meetings, the aid societies, and the machinery of the draft
The war began in South Bend on a Monday evening in the courthouse: On 15 April 1861 , three days after Sumter, a war meeting filled the old courthouse with Dr. John A. Henricks presiding and speeches by Schuyler Colfax, Ariel E. Drapier, William Miller, William G. George, Andrew Anderson, and Captain William F. Lynch…
- 1861–1865The 9th Indiana (three years) · Shiloh takes Captain Houghton
When the 9th reorganized for three years, the county's company went back under a new captain: The three-years 9th Indiana was mustered at La Porte on 5 September 1861, again under Milroy, with the county's company commanded by Captain James Houghton .
- 1861–1865The 29th Indiana · Colonel Miller of South Bend
The 29th was a La Porte regiment with a South Bend colonel and South Bend companies' worth of this county's men: Organized at La Porte and mustered on 27 August 1861, the 29th Indiana went out under Colonel John F. Miller of South Bend .
- 1861–1865The 48th Indiana · the regiment nearest the county's heart
Three full companies of the 48th were St. Joseph County's own: The 48th Indiana was organized at Goshen between 5 December 1861 and 28 January 1862 under Colonel Norman Eddy of South Bend .
- 1861–2026McDonald Studio: the house of 1861, and its 165 years
The founder: Albert J. McDonald was born in Rochester, New York, in 1841, came to South Bend at nineteen, and in 1861 purchased the photograph studio that carries his name still.
- 1862The homecoming that happened in Indianapolis, 1865
The Seventy-third Indiana was mustered into service at South Bend on August 16, 1862, under Colonel Gilbert Hathaway, its Company C raised in this county; the Eighty-seventh was organized at South Bend the same month and accepted at Indianapolis on August 31, leaving for the front the same day…
- 1862Camp Rose · two regiments organized on the fairgrounds
In the summer of 1862 South Bend was a regimental rendezvous: On the county fairgrounds the city kept Camp Rose, and there the 73rd Indiana Infantry was organized and mustered into United States service on 16 August 1862.
- 1862The succession of lodges: 294, Germania 301, Portage 675
Chapman records South Bend Lodge No. 294, instituted in 1863, meeting the first Friday of the month, and Germania Lodge No. 301, instituted in 1862, which "conducts the services in the German language," meeting the first Thursday, with John Klingel as its master in 1880.
- 1862–1865The 73rd Indiana · mustered at South Bend, and the stand at Decatur
The 73rd was mustered into service on South Bend's own ground, 16 August 1862, and its colonel died at the head of Streight's raiders: The regiment went out under Colonel Gilbert Hathaway , with Company C raised in this county.
- 1862–1865The 87th Indiana · organized at South Bend, cut in half at Chickamauga
The 87th was organized at South Bend on 28 August 1862 and mustered at Indianapolis three days later: It went out under Colonel Kline G. Shryock, with Company K and one or two other companies from this county.
- 1862–1865The 21st Battery · the county's artillery, from Chickamauga to Nashville
The 21st Battery, Indiana Light Artillery, was made up principally from St. Joseph and La Porte counties: Organized and mustered at Indianapolis on 9 September 1862 under Captain William W. Andrew, the battery went to Kentucky against Kirby Smith, fought at Carthage, Tennessee, at Hoover's Gap, at Chickamauga , and in…
- 1863Birdsell Manufacturing Company — the clover huller
The New York business lost money on western freight and markets, and Birdsell moved the work to South Bend: he built shops here in 1863 and moved in April 1864, on the standard biography.
- 1863Stephenson Underwear Mills — from the Staley woolen mill
Wool first, then underwear: The line begins with the A. C. Staley Woolen Mill, established on the East Race in 1863 and grown by 1889, the year of Staley's death, into a complex of buildings carried on by his son Marion and other stockholders — among them the four Stephenson brothers, who had started as salesmen for the company.
- 1863A. C. Staley and the Stephenson brothers — wool first, then underwear
The founding: The line begins with the A. C. Staley Woolen Mill, established on the East Race in 1863 and grown by 1889, the year of Staley's death, into a complex of buildings carried on by his son Marion and other stockholders — among them the four Stephenson brothers, who had started as salesmen for the company.
- 1863Wool first: the river mills and the underwear trade
The mill that lasted rose on the same race in 1863 — the A. C. Staley Woolen Mill, drawing power, the National Register documentation notes, from a flume between the race and the river.
- 1863–1932The First National Bank of South Bend — Charter No. 126
The charter: The First National Bank of South Bend was organized on 5 September 1863, in the first year of the national banking system, by Charles N. Culver, Thomas S. Stanfield, John A. Henricks, Ethan S. Reynolds, John Reynolds and Ransom Hubbard, with capital of $100,000.
- 1864–1865The last regiments · the hundred-days men of the 138th and the one-year men of the 155th
The county's war ended as it began, with companies raised for the emergency of the season: The 138th Indiana was a hundred-days regiment of 1864, mustered into service on 27 May 1864 under Colonel James H. Shannon, with Company H of St. Joseph County…
- 1864–1865The 12th Cavalry · Company H against Forrest and the guerrillas
Company H was the county's cavalry company, and its war was the railroad war in Alabama: The 12th Indiana Cavalry was organized at Kendallville on 1 March 1864 under Colonel Edward Anderson.
- 1864–1866The 128th Indiana · the Ninth District's regiment, from Atlanta to Franklin
The 128th was recruited across the Ninth Congressional District in the fall and winter of 1863, with St. Joseph County's men in its ranks and its reunion papers kept at Notre Dame: The regiment rendezvoused at Michigan City and was mustered into service on 18 March 1864, leaving on the 23rd by rail for Nashville and…
- 1865A city in the month of peace
South Bend became a city in the spring the war ended: On May 22, 1865 — six weeks after Appomattox — the town incorporated as a city, taking for its motto the single word "Peace," and on June 5 it held its first city elections, choosing William G. George as its first mayor.
- 1865The carriage of Lincoln's last ride stands in South Bend
The barouche: The carriage Abraham Lincoln rode to Ford's Theatre on the night of his assassination, 14 April 1865, is a Studebaker, and it stands in South Bend.
- 1865–1884The first mayors: the doctor, the poet, and the oldest man
William G. George (1865–1868): The first administration was the incorporation itself. George's government organized a city out of a town's machinery — its first council, its first ordinances, its first health officer — and in December 1866 carried the annexation of Lowell across the river.
- 1865–1907The Lafayette Avenue House: National, St. James, Windsor
The Lafayette Avenue house was a one-story frame building when President Whitten — the town's hotel investor of the period, father of the city engineer William M. Whitten — bought it from George Knoblock on 13 July 1865.
- 1865–1909The count of the transformation
Chapman, writing in 1880, records that the sales of the city's manufacturers in 1865 reached $565,000 — at wartime double values, he warns — that the products annually made would by 1880 reach $5,000,000, and that 2,500 men found constant employment in the manufactories.
- 1865–1946The homecomings
1865, at the record's size: The first homecoming is the one this record can document least ceremonially.
- 1865–2025The seats of government: rented rooms, Oliver's city hall, the tower, and the school building
From incorporation in 1865 until 1902 the government of a growing industrial city worked out of rented and borrowed space around downtown — offices over stores and theaters, and for a time a two-story building at 217 West Jefferson Boulevard that served as city hall before 1902 and stood, in later years as offices and…
- 1865–todayThe Common Council: nine seats, a century and a half
At the first city election, on 5 June 1865 — two weeks after the incorporation vote carried 286 to 194 — South Bend's voters chose a mayor and a Common Council together, and the council has sat ever since as the city's legislative body: it passes the ordinances, appropriates the money, fixes the salaries of the police…
- 1866Landmark acts III: the annexation wars
The easy century: For its first hundred years the city grew the ordinary way, taking in ground as it filled: Lowell in 1866, eighteen months after incorporation, and thereafter the platted additions at its edges, decade by decade.
- 1866The Northeast: Sorinsville's heirs
The ground annexed as the Fourth Ward in 1866 — Lowell's north end, Sorinsville and the farmland between the city and the college — is the city's Northeast neighborhood today: its organized life is the oldest continuous neighborhood machinery in South Bend.
- 1866Before the regime: sickness met at home
There was no health officer until 1866, no board of health in the record until later, and no hospital until the Sisters of the Holy Cross opened St. Joseph's in 1882; the Hospitals record of this history carries that institutional story, and this entry stands at pointer size to mark what it meant for epidemic disease.
- 1866The health office: from first officer to county department
The Government record of this history carries the office's founding: one of the acts of South Bend's first city government, in 1866, was Mayor George's appointment of the physician Louis Humphreys as the city's first health officer — Humphreys, who would himself be mayor from 1868 to 1872…
- 1866–todayThe Grand Trunk down Division Street
The second trunk line ran down the middle of a city street for sixty years: The Grand Trunk's predecessor was chartered by Indiana in 1866 to build from the Michigan line west through South Bend toward Chicago, and the city — itself a stockholder in the enterprise…
- 1867St. Joseph’s Academy — the Hub of the Sisters’ Web
The Notre Dame Archives’ Extracts of Brother Aidan carry a council entry of March 26, 1867 allowing Brother Peter of Alcantara “for the Academy of St. Joseph, South Bend” — the Academy standing in the Holy Cross record by that year.
- 1867–1921The trade at sampled years: what the directories actually show
Holland's South Bend directory of 1867 carries two names under its classified heading "Photograph Galleries": William Gibson and A. McDonald.
- 1867–2005The keeper of the story: a historical society of 1867
The Northern Indiana Historical Society was established in 1867, two years after the city's incorporation, and stands as the second-oldest historical society in Indiana.
- 1867–todayThe South Bend Community School Corporation
The corporation itself, the South Bend Community School Corporation, dates its establishment to 1867. It is the oldest and largest school corporation in St. Joseph County.
- 1868The factory city
In one generation the mill town became a factory city of the first rank: The year 1868, which gave South Bend its two great incorporations, also brought its third: Leighton Pine arrived from the Singer Manufacturing Company's New York office to build a cabinet works on the East Race, making the wooden cabinets in…
- 1868Cabinets for the world's sewing machines
The wooden half of a world machine, made here: The Singer cabinet works on the city's west side — built where the black walnut grew, begun in 1868 under Leighton Pine…
- 1868Leighton Pine — Singer's man, and the works he kept in South Bend
In the 1860s the Singer sewing machine sat in a wooden cabinet that Singer bought on contract; standing in the center of the black walnut country, South Bend drew the company's bids, and in 1868 Singer sent Pine, a cabinet worker from its New York office, to build the company its own works here.
- 1868John J. and Miles W. O'Brien — the lathe twins
The founding act: John J. and Miles W. O'Brien, identical twins born in Cork, Ireland, in 1868, founded their company in 1906 as the South Bend Machine Tool Company: one room, thirty by sixty feet, in the Dinan Building at Washington and Johnson streets, at $65 a month.
- 1868The cabinet paradox: the sewing machine's furniture
The Singer sewing machine sat in a wooden cabinet, and from 1868 Singer built those cabinets here — drawn, as the Businesses record tells it, by the black-walnut country the city stood in the middle of…
- 1868The Second St. Joseph Hotel, on Colfax Avenue
Chauncey Nichols opened it on 10 September 1868, with L. H. Packard as his clerk.
- 1868–1911Electrification: the power changes state
The South Bend Gas-Light Company was organized in January 1868 with a capital of $50,000 and its works at the foot of Jefferson Street; the city was first lit with gas on 1 December 1868, and by 1880 Chapman counts seven miles of main, 371 consumers, 119 public lamps and some 28,000 cubic feet consumed daily…
- 1868–1936The brake maker and the cabinet maker: Bendix and Pine
In 1868 the Singer company sent Pine, a cabinet worker from its New York office, to build it a works in South Bend, in the center of the black walnut country.
- 1868–1955The Singer cabinet works — the world's sewing-machine cabinets
In 1868 Singer sent Leighton Pine, a cabinet worker from its New York office, to build the company its own works here.
- 1868–todayMemorial Day: from the Grand Army's order to the West Side parade
On 5 May 1868 the order's commander-in-chief, John A. Logan, issued General Order No. 11 designating the 30th of May for decorating the graves of the Union dead, and the posts of the department carried the observance into every county seat in Indiana.
- 1869The Polish west side: four parishes and a city within the city
The Polish community made the west side: Polish families began settling South Bend in 1869, drawn by Oliver, Studebaker and Singer; they worshipped first at St. Patrick's, and by 1877 numbered 125 families there.
- 1869–1892The Directory Houses
The Emmet House stood at Franklin and South streets from 1869 to 1872. The Kunstman House, at 125 South Michigan, is listed 1871–72.
- 1869–1902The Medal of Honor: two recipients, neither by the usual road
He served as a private in Company G, 1st U.S. Cavalry, and earned the medal in the Chiricahua Mountains, Arizona, on 20 October 1869; the citation, in the Army's form for the Indian campaigns, reads in full: "Gallantry in action with Indians."
- 1869–1907The South Bend Woolen Company — a Mishawaka house on South Bend ground
The Monon Society's mill account dates the company's operations to 1869 and puts its mill on the east bank of the St. Joseph River between LaSalle and Colfax streets, in South Bend, producing principally woolen fabrics for men's wear — suiting and overcoatings.
- 1869–1953Alice Mannering: the first woman to run for mayor in Indiana
Alice Mannering (born Alice Mae Mandeville, 1869; died 1953): a trained nurse and, by 1917, president of the St. Joseph County Branch of Equal Suffrage.
- 1869–1953Alice Mannering: three and a half months a candidate for mayor
Alice Mannering (born Alice Mae Mandeville, 1869; died 1953): a trained nurse — her party's account credited her experience "in a great many of the leading hospitals in the country" — and, by 1917, president of the St. Joseph County Branch of Equal Suffrage.
- 1869–2026War Service Records: What Remains Open
1 (1869) — pages 102 and 188–255 passim, as the Wars section's log names them. This pass reached Terrell in the condensed one-volume edition, Indiana in the War of the Rebellion , and that edition argues the quotas in narrative but does not carry the county tables in a form the county's line can be taken from.
- 1869–todayThe Water Level Route: Lake Shore & Michigan Southern to New York Central
The first road to the bend became the great through route of the North: On 6 April 1869 the Michigan Southern & Northern Indiana and its partners were consolidated as the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railway — the Buffalo & Erie was absorbed on 22 June 1869…