South Bend, Indiana · 20th century
1900s
67 dated events in 1900s, in order. Part of the full timeline.
20th century 67 dated mentions
1900s
- 1900–1938The Citizens' Trust and Savings Bank — the Citizens' National's companion
The paired affiliate: In 1900 the men of the Citizens' National organized a state-chartered companion under Indiana law — carried in the county history as the Citizens' Loan, Trust and Savings Company and in the 1921 Polk directory as the Citizens' Trust and Savings Bank, at 112–114 West Jefferson Boulevard, the same…
- 1900–todayBlack South Bend's leaders: the lawyers, the nurse, and the council presidents
J. Chester Allen (born 1900) and Elizabeth Fletcher Allen: the attorneys who opened the pool. J. Chester Allen was born in 1900 at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and practiced law in South Bend with his wife, Elizabeth Fletcher Allen — Indiana's first female African American lawyer.
- 1901South Bend Bait Company — the Bass-Oreno
Bucktails from a kitchen table trade: Frank G. Worden made bucktail fly lures at home in South Bend in the 1890s, on several accounts, and appears in the city directory for the first time as proprietor of the Worden Bait Company in 1901.
- 1901The Knights of Columbus: Santa Maria Council 553
The charter: The council's own newsletter masthead carries its birth date: "Knights of Columbus, Santa Maria Council #553, Chartered January 6, 1901."
- 1901–1916The South Shore built: the Chicago, Lake Shore & South Bend
The last and longest-lived of South Bend's railroads was built like a steam road and run like a streetcar: The company was incorporated at the end of 1901 as the Chicago & Indiana Air Line Railway, and renamed the Chicago, Lake Shore & South Bend Railway on 30 July 1904.
- 1901–1939South Bend Bait: one unpatented founder innovation over a shelf of bought paper
The pattern: The fishing-tackle firm the Businesses section carries — born as the Worden Bucktail Company in 1901, renamed for this city — is this section's cleanest exhibit of the rule that a patent number or it did not happen, because its record runs in both directions at once.
- 1901–1940The Color Line at the Desk
The University of Michigan's published account of Branch Rickey's own oft-told story dates the scene 1901: the visiting Wesleyan baseball team, in town to play Notre Dame, had reserved rooms at the Oliver, and at check-in every player was accepted except one…
- 1902The wagon era beside Studebaker — Winkler Brothers and the wagon shops
The firm with the clearest afterlife is Winkler Brothers: three brothers who began at the anvil and bench and incorporated on 29 October 1902, with $75,000 capital, as the Winkler Brothers' Manufacturing Company, building a modern factory on a tract served by the Lake Shore railroad in the city's southwest.
- 1902–1914Leeper Park: The City's First Zoo, 1902
Lead: South Bend's first zoo began, in the zoo's own published words, as "a modest duck pond in Leeper Park in the spring of 1902."
- 1902–1940The Notre Dame streetcar
The Notre Dame line existed because the university finally allowed it: in 1902 Father John Zahm, provincial superior of the Congregation of Holy Cross — "a man of the most progressive ideas," the South Bend Times called him…
- 1902–1944The Merchants' National Bank — Charter No. 6334
The fourth charter: The Merchants' National Bank of South Bend was organized on 21 June 1902, OCC Charter No. 6334 — the last national charter granted in the city.
- 1902–1983The Jersey Line: the New Jersey, Indiana & Illinois
The last steam road built into South Bend was a factory's own: The New Jersey, Indiana & Illinois was incorporated in 1902 as the Singer Manufacturing Company's railroad…
- 1902–2025The Born-Here Register: Fourteen Names
Harry Arndt, infielder, 1902–07, born February 12, 1879, opens the list in the dead-ball era. George Beck, pitcher, 1914, born February 21, 1890, is its briefest line.
- 1902–today229 South Michigan — the corner of one morning in 1934
Indiana Landmarks' magazine records that the 1902 bank block — Freyermuth and Maurer's design, a masonry front unifying three commercial buildings, the bank building the Merchants National itself had erected…
- 1903The Tincher: the costliest car in the room, and the Studebaker brothers' first automobile venture
Its air-braking system was the technical wonder of the 1903 Chicago Automobile Show, where the marque debuted.
- 1903The YWCA
Founding and course: The YWCA North Central Indiana dates itself, in the boilerplate it repeats across its current releases, to 1903 — "since 1903" is the organization's own line, and it is the founding date this account carries.
- 1903St. Joseph's long course on the hill: 1903–1989
A century of building in place: The hospital the three sisters opened grew on its hill for a hundred and twenty-seven years, and the system's own published timeline is the Story of South Bend section of the growth: one hundred beds added in 1903; a training school for nurses established in 1907, its first class nine students…
- 1903The South Bend Brewing Association: the keepers' own brewery, and the longest-lived of the three
The History Museum's account, which governs this entry, dates and describes it: "In June 1903, a group of South Bend saloonkeepers of German, Polish and Hungarian descent organized the South Bend Brewing Association to manufacture and sell beer for their own saloons."
- 1903–1902Clement Studebaker Jr. and George M. Studebaker — the watch company
The second generation buys a works: In 1903, on the standard account — the NAWCC company history compiled by Warren H. Riddle dates the purchase to 1902, and both stand — Clement Studebaker Jr. and George Studebaker bought the assets of the bankrupt Columbus Watch Company of Columbus, Ohio, and organized the South Bend Watch Company.
- 1903–1907The Indiana Foundry Company
Howard gives the Indiana Foundry Company its own section: it was organized on 17 April 1903 with a capital of $10,000, and its incorporators were William N. Bergan, Alonzo A. Forsyth, Joseph Bergan, Frederick L. Dennis, Edward Bergan, Hiram W. VanNest, and Chauncey N. Fassett — three Bergans among the seven.
- 1903–1909Charter members of the Central League, 1903–1909
The return: League baseball came back in 1903 with the Central League, and South Bend's Green Stockings were a charter member.
- 1903–1929South Bend Watch Company — a million watches in twenty-six years
The Studebaker sons buy a watch works: In 1903, on the standard account — the NAWCC company history compiled by Warren H. Riddle dates the purchase to 1902 — Clement Studebaker Jr. and George Studebaker bought the assets of the bankrupt Columbus Watch Company of Columbus, Ohio, and organized the South Bend Watch Company.
- 1903–1929The South Bend Watch "freezing process": a claim tested
The claim: The watch company the Businesses section carries — the South Bend Watch Company, some 1.2 million movements, 1903 to the 1929 crash…
- 1903–2020The monuments and the riverfront works
The courthouse ground: The city's oldest monumental work is the Soldiers and Sailors Monument at the St. Joseph County Courthouse: designed by the sculptor Rudolf Schwarz and erected in 1903, a bronze monument about sixty-five feet overall, raised to the county's Civil War dead.
- 1903–todayThe League of Women Voters and the YWCA: the ballot's institutions
The YWCA North Central Indiana dates itself, in the line it repeats across its published materials, to 1903 — "since 1903" is the organization's own founding statement, and the Charities section carries it with the honest caveat that the founding's circumstances — the organizers, the first rooms, the charter…
- 1903–todayThe memorials and the namings
The Soldiers and Sailors Monument (1903): the city's oldest war memorial stands at 206 West Washington, on the courthouse ground downtown.
- 1904The Order of the Owls: founded in South Bend
On November 20, 1904, in the law offices of Talbot and Talbot, a group of South Bend men — John W. Talbot (the name is also spelled Talbott in some accounts), Joseph E. Talbot, George D. Beroth, J. Lott Losey, John J. Johnson, John D. Burke, William Weaver, and Frank Dunbar — adopted a constitution and founded the Order of the Owls.
- 1904The Order of Owls: a national secret order founded in South Bend
The one order this city invented: On 20 November 1904, in the law offices of Talbot and Talbot in South Bend, a group of businessmen who had been meeting for mutual assistance adopted a constitution and founded the Order of Owls.
- 1904–1911The Garford arrangement: Studebaker bodies on Ohio chassis
The arrangement, exactly: Studebaker's gasoline automobile business began in 1904 in partnership with the Garford Company of Elyria, Ohio, and the division of work was the reverse of what the badge suggested.
- 1904–1930The Cutter works — the streetlight factory
In 1904 he paid $5,000 for two and a half acres at the corner of Notre Dame Avenue and Northside Boulevard in South Bend and built his factory; legally he started fresh — a new George Cutter Company, incorporated in Indiana on 5 April 1905 with his partner Albert Schneible and a capital investment of $10,000.
- 1904–1986Robertson's — the big store at 211 South Michigan
Brothers from New York: Robertson Brothers Company opened its first South Bend store in 1904, under its president George A. Robertson — the 1921 Polk directory lists the company at 127–133 South Michigan Street, dealing in dry goods, carpets, cloaks, millinery, gloves, and laces.
- 1904–1996Black women's organizing: the Ruffin name, Hering House, and the clubs
The St. Pierre Ruffin Club, 1904: the earliest documented organization of Black women in South Bend enters the record at a founding.
- 1905Keller Park and the Whitcomb & Keller city
Keller's own 1905 house stands at 609 Portage Avenue in Chapin Park, one developer's plat inside another's — the builders of the neighborhoods lived in them.
- 1905Temple Beth-El: South Bend's Reform Congregation
Founding: Temple Beth-El began with a meeting called for 9 January 1905 by Simon Greenebaum, Sam Adler, and Samuel Spiro "to complete the organization for a new Jewish Congregation," in the congregation's own words.
- 1905Joe's Tavern: the west side's 120-year room
A grocery and a bar: The brick building at 1201 Dunham Street, at Arnold Street in the old Polish west side, carries its construction date in its cornice: 1905.
- 1905–1906The Ground: Potawatomi Park
The Parks Department's own chronological history dates Potawatomi Park's establishment to 1905.
- 1905–1906Potawatomi Park: The Fairgrounds Gift
The Parks Department's chronological history dates Potawatomi Park's establishment to 1905, and Beyer's report for 1906 counts the ground among that year's acquisitions: "The most important park property which was added to our park system is the old County Fair grounds, presented to the city of South Bend by the…
- 1905–1937Bantam before Torrington — the bearings works' front end
The Bantam Ball Bearing Company was organized in March 1905 at Bantam, Connecticut, and in July 1928 it moved its entire operation to South Bend — the date the standard company history and the Tribune 's own editorial of 25 September 1935 both give.
- 1905–1982Kenneth Rexroth — the poet
The tie, exactly: Rexroth was born in South Bend on December 22, 1905 — and that, with an early childhood, is the whole of it.
- 1906South Bend Lathe — one room, then the world's lathe
The O'Brien twins: John J. and Miles W. O'Brien, identical twins born in Cork, Ireland in 1868, founded the 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.
- 1906The fountain that was given twice
The Studebaker Electric Fountain, twenty-eight feet high, was unveiled in Howard Park on 21 July 1906. In 1941 it was dismantled and thought melted for scrap; its top third was rescued by Mary and John Seiler and kept.
- 1906–1907The Round Table
"The club was organized during the winter of 1906-7, chiefly through the efforts of Wilbert Ward. The first meeting was held in March, 1907."
- 1906–1956South Bend Lathe: the licensed gearbox and the patented drive
The patent literature searched for this section gives that feature to another man in another state: the gearbox was built under license from the Flather patent, No. 810,634 of 23 January 1906, held by the Flather company of Nashua, New Hampshire, and the Flather number was carried on the data plates of South Bend's…
- 1906–1994The Old Courthouse museum — eighty-eight years in a courtroom building
In 1906 the county did just that. The society took the old courthouse, a building already half a century old and already once picked up and moved, and made its museum there.
- 1906–2021The System Today: The Department's Own Count
In 1906 the city acquired approximately seventy-eight acres of park property in a single year, by Beyer's own accounting — a year's growth, not a total, the earliest acreage figure in the record.
- 1907Horses to tractors: the mechanization of the county
One lifetime holds the whole change: Howard's 1907 biographies preserve the change in a single family's memory: an Olive Township farmer who "used the old cradle to cut the grain," had seen his father cut grain with a sickle, and remembered the first binder brought into Olive Township.
- 1907The suburban conversion: farmland against the suburbs
The conversion's face is visible as early as Howard's 1907 biographies, where the Portage Township farmer Joseph Eckman platted the part of his farm that "formerly adjoined the city of South Bend on the south" into "desirable residence lots on the west side of Michigan street"…
- 1907The fraternal city of 1907: Howard's census
The count: Timothy E. Howard's History of St. Joseph County (1907) closes its account of the city's societies with a census of the club world as it stood that year, and it is the fullest single picture of the membership city ever printed.
- 1907Knights and Ladies of Columbia: a second home office
Supreme officers at South Bend: Howard's census records a second fraternal order whose government sat in this city in 1907, smaller than the Owls and without their chronicler: the Knights and Ladies of Columbia, whose supreme officers Howard lists as residents at work here…
- 1907The named social clubs of 1907
Whether the Country Club of the St. Joseph Valley of 1907 is an ancestor of the South Bend Country Club founded in 1916 is a natural guess the record reached does not make; the two names stand separately until a document joins them.
- 1907–1995Ollie Bejma: The Studebaker Team's Own Major Leaguer
Aloysius Frank Bejma — Ollie — was born September 12, 1907, in South Bend, quit school at sixteen, went to work for Studebaker, and played five years on the company's baseball team, in the factory game the Sports leg records.
- 1907–2002George Rickey: born here, taken at six, brought back
George Warren Rickey (1907–2002): the pioneer of kinetic sculpture, and the record's cleanest statement of a birth tie.
- 1907–2024The press as institution: the Press Club, the halls, and the archives
Howard's 1907 chapter on the city's fraternal and social organizations lists "the Press Club" among the clubs of the city — one documented mention, at survey size, of the journalists' own organization in the two-paper era.
- 1907–2026The ambulance: from the police wagon to the EMS Division
The business men's leaflet of 1907, reprinted in Howard's history, lists a "Police ambulance system" among the city's assets, beside the Gamewell fire and police alarms…
- 1908Two names that do not add a marque: a car called "South Bend," and the Bendix buggy
Vincent Bendix founded his first company at Chicago in 1907 to build "Bendix Motor Buggies"; Doyle's register and the Kimes-derived record alike seat the Bendix Company and its car at Logansport, Indiana, in 1908–1909.
- 1908E-M-F and Flanders: the cars South Bend sold to the world but did not build
The narrative — the September 1908 contract that made Studebaker the E-M-F's exclusive distributor, Fred Fish's purchase of a third of the company that year and of the remainder in 1910, the million-dollar campaign Studebaker directed to remedy the early cars' defects for their owners, and the rebadging of the two…
- 1908Temperance and the makers: what the dry crusade did to the plants
The state's county-option law of 1908 let counties vote themselves dry or wet; the Proctor Law of 1911 moved the voting unit down to the city and township.
- 1908–1912E-M-F: bought for its factories, remembered for its failures
The agreement: In September 1908 Studebaker contracted with the E-M-F Company of Detroit — Everitt, Metzger, and Flanders — on new terms: E-M-F would manufacture the cars and Studebaker would distribute them exclusively through its wagon dealers.
- 1908–1931The Union Trust Company — the failure of June 1931
The company: The Union Trust Company was organized in 1908 and banked at 202–204 South Michigan Street with capital of $200,000.
- 1908–2022The corridor test · the region's documented cases, checked one by one
On April 28, 1908, the farmhouse burned, with a headless woman's body and her three children's in the ruins — whether the woman was Gunness was never proved, and she never stood trial.
- 1909The Ricketts Automobile Works: a unit power plant and a crankshaft cut from solid steel
The record, at the size the trade press left it: The Ricketts Automobile Works of South Bend enters the written record in the trade press of February 1909, and the entry the magazine gave it is a serious one.
- 1909Truck crops: onions, celery, cucumbers, and potatoes
Onions were the muck's measured staple among the vegetables — 239 acres devoted to the crop in 1909, "grown chiefly on the muck areas."
- 1909The dairy county
In 1909, the average number of cows milked was 8,212. The total value of dairy products for this same year was $559,462" — dairying, with truck farming, "becoming of great importance" beside the county's general farming.
- 1909The Italian thread: Calabrians who stayed
Its findings: Calabrian miners from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan came seasonally to shovel coal for the Indiana & Michigan Electric Company; some Italian arrivals bound for the steel mills of Gary — United States Steel's works, from 1909 — stopped in South Bend and stayed…
- 1909The Chamber: a century as the business community's corporation
The corporate line: The South Bend Regional Chamber descends from the Chamber of Commerce founded in 1909, when the city's manufacturers were at their flood.
- 1909–1963The second industrial age: the auto-parts conversion
The system changed its product without changing its skills: The census of 1909 already lists the seed of the next age among the engines of the last one — "the establishment and growth of the automobile industry" stands in the Thirteenth Census's own explanation of South Bend's 83.5 per cent growth.
- 1909–todayThe Industrial Architecture — Plants, Breweries and Mills
The Administration Building at 635 South Main, designed by S. S. Beman of Chicago and opened in June 1909 — 149,000 square feet in concrete, its original fixtures substantially surviving…