Abram Auten came from Ohio to farm a field and find a fortune at a plot of land on South Bend’s southside, sandwiched between a set of roads that would later come to be known as Magnolia, Ireland, and Indiana 23. Today, the old Auten farm is a healthy stone’s throw across U.S. 31 from the Four Winds Casino. The land is largely grown over, marked with wooded lots and houses with gravel driveways set back into the trees.
It’s about as far away as you can get from Auten Road without abandoning a South Bend address.
Abram Auten was an Ohio farmer who recognized opportunity when he saw it, and as plum farmland southwest of South Bend was scooped up by enterprising agriculturalists across the Midwest, Auten was sure to get his piece of the pie, moving his young family onto a slice of rich Hoosier farmland that skirted the Grand Kankakee Marsh. The acreage had once been home to one of Alexis Coquillard’s trading posts, and Abram Auten would recall digging up silver relics and trinkets in the coming decades.
Life on the farm was good for the Autens, but it was not quiet, and it was not quaint. Their homestead existed on the rugged edge of a rugged marsh, and the South Bend Tribune went out of its way to point out the number of rattlesnakes Abram Auten encountered on his property.
But in the truest demonstration of the American ethic, Auten tamed his land. He built a two-story house, a barn, and two other out-buildings. He kept bees and grew orchards. For as much as they might have decried his snakes, The Tribune also went out of its way at least twice to recount the quality of the peaches grown on the Auten farm. But it was not those peaches that would bring the Autens their hard-earned fame, and it wasn’t their honey that would earn them a road name.
It was shortly after arriving in South Bend that the Autens celebrated the birth of their son, John. John Auten was the first of the family to be born in Indiana and the first to attend school. He would become the first one to leave the family farm and the first in his neighborhood to enlist to fight in the Civil War.
By the summer of 1861, he’d also become the first person from the county to die in it.
On July 9, 1861, John Auten had felled a rebel soldier of his own, dropping a Confederate scout and returning to camp beaming and carrying a brace of revolvers he’d retrieved from his enemy. The next day, a similar set of actions would unfold, but this time it was John Auten taking a bullet to the chest, bleeding out in a Virginia huckleberry field at a place called Laurel Hill while his comrades returned fire. The next day, the Union Army would win a decisive victory at the Battle of Laurel Hill.
By some accounts, John Auten was the first man from Indiana to die in the Civil War. By all accounts, he was the first from South Bend.
Auten’s body was sent back to South Bend for a public funeral at the courthouse. More than 5,000 attended the ceremony, where Auten’s body was draped with an American flag and dressed in evergreen branches. He was buried with the revolvers he’d won from the Confederate soldier the day before his death.
Auten’s commanding officer, Major J.W. Gordon, recounts Auten’s death 20 years later:
Abram Auten commissioned Curran Swain to paint a life-sized oil portrait of his martyred son, then later donated the painting to the GAR post that had renamed itself the Auten Post in John Auten’s honor. By 1941, the post closed its roster. It’s not known what happened to the painting.
In 1933, for some reason or another, St. Joseph County set to the task of renaming roughly half of its most important roads, and John Auten’s name was an obvious one to remember in the place’s geographic nomenclature. The only problem was that that although Auten had been a southside kid, the city’s alphabetical road scheme started from the north. The Auten name would replace the old Army Road near the state line, slotting perfectly into the alphabetical grid between Adams and Brick. Today’s Auten Road primarily runs between Portage and Hazel with tiny legs near Elbel Golf Course and north of New Carlisle.
John Auten is buried at the South Bend City Cemetery.
Aaron Helman is an author, adventurer, and historian from South Bend. He grew up near Auten Road. His newest book, “On the Southernmost Bend,” is available for preorder right now.