South Bend, Indiana · 19th century
1830s
48 dated events in 1830s, in order. Part of the full timeline.
19th century 48 dated mentions
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.