South Bend, Indiana · 19th century
1850s
42 dated events in 1850s, in order. Part of the full timeline.
19th century 42 dated mentions
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.