Happy 160th birthday, South Bend!
On May 22, 1865, South Bend was incorporated as a city and William G. George was elected the city’s first mayor.
Current Mayor James Mueller plans to mark the day with a news event, calling on residents to celebrate the city’s birth.
The St. Joseph Valley had long been occupied by Native Americans. The first permanent European settlers arrived here in the early 1820s. A timeline put together for the city’s 150th anniversary in May 2015 outlined the many early changes, including the St. Joseph Potawatomi, the ancestors of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, who settled in the Great Lakes for a millennium and who eventually settled in the 1600s near the St. Joseph River.
Europeans like René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle and Pierre Navarre, an agent for the American Fur Co., arrived and become the first people of European ancestry to settle here.
South Bend would grow steadily.
The Rev. Edward F. Sorin founded the University of Notre Dame here in 1842.
In 1852, the Studebaker brothers would open a blacksmith shop at the corner of Jefferson Boulevard and Michigan Street and would eventually grow it into one of the Big 4 automotive manufacturers in the first half of the 20th century before ceasing local operations in 1963.
They would be joined by such major corporations as Oliver Chilled Plow, Bendix Manufacturing Corporation, the South Bend Toy Company, Singer Sewing Machine Company and the South Bend Range Company, among many others.
The South Bend 150 Birthday Weekend celebration kicked off with the debut of the new light installation “River Lights” along the St. Joseph River on Friday, May 22, 2015 in South Bend.
In a South Bend Tribune story from the city’s Sesquicentennial celebration in 2015, the staff report said the city appeared quite different than the current configuration.
“Many downtown street names were the same as they are today, but in 1865, these dusty dirt roads were lined with small shops and houses made of brick and wood rather than high-rises,” the story said. “Horse-drawn carriages ruled the roadways instead of fast-moving automobiles.”
Since the big 150th birthday bash, the city has only continued to grow in population and pursue new development.
Today, the city has 103,713 residents, according to estimated totals from the U.S. Census Bureau as of July 2024 on nearly 42 square miles of area.
Downtown South Bend as seen from a drone on Tuesday, May 28, 2024.
In the last 10 years, for example, South Bend put forth its mayor as a presidential candidate and later saw him become the transportation secretary, the Morris Performing Arts Center celebrated its 100th anniversary, hundreds of apartment and condo residences have been built or are under construction in the downtown area, in-fill housing has been built or is under construction in other parts of the city, and Howard Park underwent a major renovation that’s made it the city’s premier park.
Happy birthday, South Bend residents.
Email Tribune staff writer Greg Swiercz at gswiercz@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: City of South Bend celebrates 160th anniversary of its charter