Every school bus I ever rode to every school I ever attended barreled down Portage Road between Cleveland Road and Lathrop Street. Every morning and every afternoon, we rode past the place I lived when I was born and the place my parents live now. We cruised past the cemetery where my grandfather was buried and where my grandmother would be buried in the years after my local education was complete.
I was 37 years old when I stopped to think about how Portage Road got its name. The history of the historic portage that carved its way through South Bend wasn’t even hidden or stashed away in a basement filing cabinet. It was right there in the name of the road, a history so fascinating that it should have been common knowledge for every man, woman, and child on the west side of South Bend.
And yet somehow it wasn’t.
If I’ve learned one thing as a writer of local history stories, it’s that history doesn’t get preserved on its own. It takes passionate and dedicated people to preserve it. If those people aren’t there to tell the stories, it doesn’t matter how much you pay attention in school. You can’t learn something that’s not taught.
Through thirteen Februarys and thirteen Black History months, I never learned about the historic Huggart settlement on the south side of South Bend. I never learned about the Underground Railroad stations within the city limits or the early sense of racial progress that would lead to the South Bend Fugitive Slave Case of 1847. No one ever shared the incredible true story of Better Homes that has become a book, a museum, and a stage play in the years since Gabrielle Robinson decided the story needed to be shared.
I didn’t know that South Bend had a roller coaster or a God-awful train catastrophe. I certainly never heard about Babe Ruth’s exploits in my hometown or that the first American shot in World War I was fired by a brave South Bender from a Hungarian neighborhood on the city’s southwest corner.
No one ever told me that as recently as 120 years ago, South Bend was home to one of the largest swamplands in North America; and certainly no one told me that a conscious and irreversible decision was later made to destroy it altogether.
Those are the kinds of stories you don’t hear if someone doesn’t tell you. That’s why I wrote a pair of local history books and why I’m excited to introduce a new one – this time for children in South Bend and Michiana:
On the Southernmost Bend is a beginning history of South Bend that begins with mammoths and sabertoothed tigers in the ice age and continues to present day. Filled with gorgeous full-color illustrations, this book tells the story of the Native Americans who got here first, the founders who made the place a city, and the businessmen and political heroes who helped it grow into what it is today.
The book is designed to ignite curiosity in our youngest readers and serves as a jumping off point for teachers and parents who want to explore more of South Bend’s history. If you’ve got kids or grandkids (or great grandkids!) who call South Bend home, this book needs to be on their shelves.
This is my third local history book, and I’m still learning and discovering things I never heard, never knew, and never learned. There’s always more to share, but only as long as we have more people to share it. Maybe there’s a future historian ready to discover that South Bend is more important, more fascinating, and more interesting than we ever considered before.
Preorders for On the Southernmost Bend are available now. >>