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Ernest M. Morris: The Banker's Fortune, Built on a Borrowed $100
The fortune: The Morris fortune is the one South Bend fortune that the Depression enlarged rather than broke, and Notre Dame's own account of its founder begins at the smallest figure in this section after the Studebakers' $68: Ernest M. Morris, an orphan without funds, received a $100 loan in 1905 from the university's president, Father John W. Cavanaugh, took his law degree in 1906, and in 1917 founded the company that became the Associates Investment Corporation, a pioneer of automobile consumer finance (the bank's and the university's accounts, as carried in the Banks section). In the banking crisis he took the presidency of South Bend's combined bank and, with Vincent Bendix, put the new capital in — $500,000 each, on the bank's own published account — and the institution he rebuilt became 1st Source Bank, by the end of the 1950s the seventh-largest bank in Indiana.
Its scale: No published total for Morris's estate appears in the sources consulted, and none is stated here. The fortune's documented public act is its gift: Ernest and Ella Morris gave $1,000,000 to Notre Dame for the Morris Inn — the university's accounts divide on the year, one placing the gift in 1947 and its own memorial notice placing it a year before his death in May 1951 — and the building, dedicated in 1952, still carries his name at the campus gate. He bought Tippecanoe Place out of the Studebaker bankruptcy for $20,000 in 1941 and gave it to the South Bend schools: the banking fortune literally taking the industrial fortune's house off its hands, at five cents on the construction dollar, is the Depression's South Bend story in one transaction.
Sources:
- University of Notre Dame — the $100 loan of 1905 from Father Cavanaugh; the 1917 founding of the Associates; the Morris Inn gift and Morris's death in May 1951 (NDWorks memorial notice, 2023; Notre Dame Facilities, 2011); Converse University release (2023) — the gift dated 1947.
- 1st Source Corporation, 2013 annual report, as carried in the Banks section — the Morris presidency and the $500,000 investments of Morris and Bendix.
- University of Notre Dame, Building South Bend — the 1941 Tippecanoe purchase at $20,000 and gift to the schools.