1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/South Bend

SOUTH BEND, a city and the county-seat of St Joseph county, Indiana, U.S.A., at the head of navigation and on the southern bend (hence the name) of the St Joseph river of Michigan, and (by rail) 86 m. E. by S. of Chicago. Pop. (1900), 35,999, of whom 8601 were foreign-born (including 3053 Poles and 2402 Germans); (1910, census), 53,684. Land area (1906), 6.2 sq. m. It is served by the Grand Trunk, the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern, the Michigan Central, the New Jersey Indiana & Illinois, the Chicago, Indiana & Southern, and the Vandalia railways, and by four inter-urban electric lines. Among the principal buildings are the city-hall, the county court-house, the public library, and the Oliver Hotel. In Notre Dame, a suburb, are St Mary's College and Academy (Roman Catholic, chartered 1855) for girls, and the university of Notre Dame du Lac (Roman Catholic, first opened in 1842, and chartered in 1844). In 1910 the university had 87 instructors, 1005 students, and a library of 60,000 volumes. It is the headquarters of the order of the Holy Cross, whose sisters have charge of St Mary's College and Academy. South Bend ranked fourth among the manufacturing cities of the state in 1905. Its industrial establishments include carriage and wagon works (those of the Studebaker Bros. Manufacturing Company being the largest in the world), plough and agricultural machine works—the Oliver Chilled Plow Works, founded by James Oliver (1823–1909), being particularly well known—the wood-working department of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, iron and steel foundries, flour-mills, and paper and pulp mills. The water-supply is obtained from 122 artesian wells, with a daily capacity of about 24,000,000 gallons. South Bend was the site of an Indian village and of a French trading post. It was settled about 1820, laid out about 1831 (when it became the county-seat of St Joseph county), incorporated as a village in 1835, and chartered as a city in 1865.