Alexis Coquillard: The Fortune That Ended in a Debt Workout

Alexis Coquillard: The Fortune That Ended in a Debt Workout

The fortune: Coquillard (1795–1855), the trader who with Taylor platted the town, was the valley's largest fur-trade operator, and the county histories disagree at the root about what his start cost. Chapman (1880) states that in 1822 Coquillard and Francis Comparet bought the exclusive control of the American Fur Company's upper-lakes agency, "including the property and debts due the post," for about $175,000. Howard (1907) states that the partners "are said to have paid several thousand dollars" for the same property and control. Both accounts are carried here; the print record does not reconcile them. What followed is documented in a harder class of record. He built the town's first flouring mills, and in 1840 took a federal contract to carry through a Potawatomi emigration at, in Chapman's words, "very heavy outlay."

Its scale, in the court and deed records: The collapse, not the accumulation, is what the documents size. In 1840 the government drafts for the $40,000 due Coquillard under the removal contract fell into the hands of his agent Alverson, who, Chapman records, "converted over $40,000 to his own use, leaving Coquillard not only to suffer the consequence of the whole defalcation, but with heavy and crushing liabilities." An agreement of 28 April 1840, preserved in the Indiana Supreme Court's report of The State Bank v. Coquillard, 6 Ind. 186 (1855), shows him conveying 1,844 acres in St. Joseph and Lake counties and assigning $21,000 in promissory notes to the State Bank of Indiana for $20,000 of mill-financing money; the lands were afterward shown to be worth $7,000. A mortgage of 22 July 1841 to the bank's South Bend branch secured $45,639.85 in twelve notes, and its satisfaction is recorded on the deed record in the hardest words in this section: satisfaction acknowledged "by the conveyance of the mortgaged premises in fee simple to the mortgagee." In November 1841 he conveyed the great block of his remaining land to John D. Defrees for a stated $75,000, under a $150,000 bond by which Defrees undertook to pay seven judgments against Coquillard in the St. Joseph Circuit Court, the eleven bank notes, and other accounts — reserving back to Coquillard only $25,000, payable at $1,000 a year without interest. The $75,000 and $150,000 are the paper size of a land-for-debts transfer, not a cash fortune.

What it left: He went on milling: after a dam was built on the St. Joseph in 1844 he built a modern flour mill near present Colfax Avenue, and he died in its burned ruins — on 8 January 1855, examining the wreck of the mill that had burned the Saturday before, he fell from a beam and was killed; business in South Bend closed the day of his funeral (Chapman). No probate total for his estate appears in any published source consulted — not in Chapman, Anderson, or Howard — and none is stated here; the probate volumes that would hold it survive at the county courthouse and on microfilm, unread in print. The modern telling that he "lost everything" on the mill race is shorthand; the documented loss is the 1840–41 sequence above. One warning the record requires: the estate figures sometimes attached to this name in later print — lands valued at $113,575 and $43,375 in the 1916 partition cases reported as Coquillard v. Coquillard, 62 Ind. App. 426 — belong to his nephew, Alexis Coquillard the wagon-works founder (d. 1890), not to the founder of the town.

Sources:

1. Chapman, History of St. Joseph County (1880), pp. 463–466 — the $175,000 agency purchase; the $40,000 Alverson defalcation; the death of 8 January 1855.
2. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, Vol. I (1907), p. 132 — the agency purchase at "several thousand dollars."
3. The State Bank v. Coquillard, 6 Ind. 186 (Ind. 1855) — the 1840 agreement: 1,844 acres, $21,000 in notes, $20,000 paid, the lands worth $7,000.
4. Abstract of Title No. 9968, City of South Bend — the 22 July 1841 mortgage for $45,639.85 and its satisfaction by conveyance; the November 1841 Defrees deed ($75,000), mortgage, and $150,000 bond; the $25,000 reserved in $1,000 annual installments.
5. Coquillard v. Coquillard, 62 Ind. App. 426 (1916) — the nephew's estate lands at $113,575 and $43,375, carried here only to keep the names apart.