Springbrook Park, halfway between two cities

South Bend, Ind. In 1901 a Walkerton paper put it in one line: Springbrook Park lay “midway between South Bend and Mishawaka.” It stood on the St. Joseph River, on what is now Lincolnway East. On the card a crowd in summer white walks along a pond, with a pavilion and the frame of a ride behind them.

For more than sixty years that stretch of riverbank was where the two cities went to have fun. They went for baseball, from the first game in 1896 to the women of the South Bend Blue Sox half a century later. They went for vaudeville and band concerts, for roller coasters and a German merry-go-round, for horse races, a dance hall where big-name bands played, and once, in the summer of 1952, a NASCAR race. Then the gates closed, the rides went, and the ground became a golf course and finally student housing.

Springbrook was a trolley park, a kind of place that hardly exists any more. This is its story, from the streetcar company that built it to the concrete that still stands at the south edge of the field.

A park at the end of the line

DocumentedThe park was born with the streetcar. In 1895 an electric railway joined South Bend to Mishawaka, running big double-truck passenger cars. The Indiana Historical Society calls it one of the earliest interurban lines in the nation and the first in Indiana. The company behind it began in 1885 as the South Bend Railway Company and went through a series of reorganizations and new names; by 1907 it was the Chicago, South Bend & Northern Indiana Railway, and after 1930 the Northern Indiana Railway.

DocumentedThe Clio entry on the park says the street railway bought the land along the south side of the river, from today’s Ironwood Drive to Lincolnway East, as a terminal for riders between the two cities. A photograph in Indiana University South Bend’s archives, courtesy of the Northern Indiana Historical Society, is captioned with the reason: the park was created “to entertain local residents” and to draw more riders to the railway.

ReadingThat was the trolley-park idea. A streetcar line carried people to work all week, but its cars stood half-empty on Sundays and summer evenings. Put a park at the far end of the line, or halfway along it, and every family that wanted a picnic, a ball game or a show had to buy a ride there and back. Springbrook, sitting midway between the two cities, could fill cars from both directions.

DocumentedThe sources do not agree on when the park began. Wikipedia gives 1880 for a trolley park called Springbrook; IU South Bend’s archive says 1896; the Clio entry says the railway company opened it in 1899. The newspapers settle part of it: a ball diamond at Springbrook Park was new in June 1896.

Baseball on the new diamond

DocumentedBaseball came early. In June 1896 a team was to play all its games “on the new diamond at Springbrook Park,” and in 1897 the South Bend “Senators” played Whiting there.

DocumentedThe Bygone Places of the Monon history gives the date of the first game as 14 June 1896, and calls the park South Bend’s home of baseball from 1896 into the 1950s, for semi-professional teams and some professional ones. On 28 August 1904 a game there was played at night, under portable lights.

DocumentedProfessional baseball arrived in 1903, when South Bend joined the Class B Central League with a team called the Green Stockings. They opened at Springbrook Park, and South Bend’s minor-league teams played their home games there in most seasons through 1932. Among them were the Benders, who returned to the Central League in 1916 and kept playing at the park. The ballpark held about 3,500 people.

ReadingA night game in 1904 was a stunt, not a habit. Lights good enough for regular night baseball were still about thirty years away. But it shows the kind of place Springbrook was meant to be: somewhere you went to see something you could not see at home.

Vaudeville, rides and a White City

DocumentedIn June 1899 the papers reported that a vaudeville theatre would be built at the park, and in March 1901 that the railway company would put up a new summer theatre. By 1904 there were matinees at the Springbrook Park Casino. In April 1907, under the headline “White City for South Bend,” the Walkerton Independent reported that the Chicago, South Bend & Northern Indiana Railway, “which owns Springbrook park,” had leased it for ten years to the Interurban Amusement Company, which promised a big theatre, a dancing pavilion and other attractions.

Reading“White City” was a name with meaning in 1907. It recalled the gleaming buildings of the Chicago world’s fair of 1893, and amusement parks across the country were taking it up. The headline told readers that South Bend was to have a real amusement park of the new kind, not just a picnic ground with a ball field.

DocumentedBy 1912, according to John Palmer’s South Bend in Vintage Postcards, as summarized by Wikipedia, the park had a casino, an exhibition hall and a roller coaster. The Roller Coaster DataBase records four coasters there over the years: the wooden Royal Dip, the wooden Figure 8, the wooden Jack Rabbit, and a small steel Little Dipper for children. The Clio entry adds a music hall and a merry-go-round imported from Germany, and IU South Bend’s archive a swimming pool, a bandstand, circuses and scout jamborees.

DocumentedIn the summer of 1914 there were Sunday band concerts, and families came out for picnic suppers. The year before, the trade paper Billboard’s list of parks for 22 March 1913 entered Springbrook Park, South Bend, as owned by the Northern Indiana Railway, under a manager named in the entry, and noted that it played bands.

DocumentedA race track came in 1916, and with it a grandstand. Over the years the park hosted horse racing, fireworks and, for many years, the 4-H Fair, whose livestock were shown on the grounds.

ReadingThe pattern is plain. In its first years Springbrook was a ball field with a theatre; by the 1910s it was a full amusement park with rides, music and a racing grandstand. The railway had built a destination, and the destination outgrew its reason for being: by the time automobiles carried families out Lincolnway on their own, the park no longer needed the streetcar at all.

Playland

DocumentedIn the 1920s Earl J. “Pete” Redden took over the park and held a contest to rename it, and the winning name was Playland Park. The ballpark stayed. In the years after the Second World War the South Bend Blue Sox of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League played their home games there.

DocumentedThe sources date the change to 1924 or 1925. Wikipedia and a WNIT documentary say Redden became manager in 1924 and that the contest renamed the park Playland and its coaster the Jack Rabbit. The Clio entry says Redden bought the park in 1925; a history of South Bend baseball says the grounds were renamed in 1925 after the Northern Indiana Railway bought them.

DocumentedPlayland’s dance hall drew crowds of two to three thousand on weekends, and the big bands came: Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington and Ozzie Nelson all played there, according to the park’s Wikipedia article and the WNIT program.

DocumentedThe streetcars that had built the park did not outlast it. The Northern Indiana Railway gave up its interurban lines in 1934 and kept only its city streetcars in South Bend and Mishawaka; in June 1940 it ran its last streetcars and changed over to buses.

The Blue Sox

DocumentedThe South Bend Blue Sox were one of the four original teams of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, founded during the Second World War, and one of only two that played in all twelve of its seasons, from 1943 to 1954. They began at Bendix Field. In 1946 they moved to Playland Park, which the state historical marker calls “more centrally located and better-equipped,” and attendance rose.

DocumentedAt Playland the Blue Sox won the league pennant in 1951 and the playoff championships of 1951 and 1952, and they stayed until the league folded after the 1954 season. In 2021 the Indiana Historical Bureau, The History Museum and IU South Bend put up a state marker to the team on Ironwood Drive. At its dedication, in the last week of May, seventy-five years after the team’s first game at the park, was Betsy “Sockum” Jochum, a Blue Sox player who had turned one hundred that February.

“Women played here for the fun of playing baseball, and guess what? They got paid for it.”

Stock cars on the half-mile

DocumentedOn Sunday, 20 July 1952, the old horse track became a speedway. The NASCAR Grand National series, the forerunner of today’s Cup Series, ran a 100-mile race of 200 laps on the half-mile dirt oval at Playland Park Speedway. Nineteen cars started. Herb Thomas started first; Tim Flock, driving a 1951 Hudson owned by Ted Chester, started second, led 159 laps and won. Lee Petty finished second. The crowd was counted at 3,700.

DocumentedLouise Smith is listed with the entries for the race but not among the starters. It was the only NASCAR race ever held in South Bend.

ReadingThe Bygone Places of the Monon page dates the race 20 June 1951; the NASCAR record books give 20 July 1952. We follow the record books.

After the gates closed

ReadingThe park closed about 1960, and the land later became a golf course and then student housing for Indiana University South Bend. Pieces of the concrete grandstand are said to remain.

DocumentedThe sources split between 1960 and 1961 for the closing. Clio says 1960, “due to several factors”; Wikipedia and WNIT say 1961. A lighted par-three golf course and a miniature golf course took the ground in the 1960s and lasted into the 1980s or later. Indiana University bought the land in the 1990s, and River Crossing student housing for IU South Bend opened there in 2008.

DocumentedThe grandstand is real. Clio describes the concrete grandstands of the horse track as still standing, the only part of the park that remains, and a moderator of a South Bend history group told the South Bend Tribune that “the bleachers are still there on the southern edge of the field.” The Monon history gives the park’s old address as 1902 Lincolnway East, at Lincolnway and Ironwood.

ReadingIt is fitting that the last piece standing is a set of seats. For six decades people came to Springbrook and Playland to watch: a ball game under portable lights, a vaudeville turn, a band, a horse race, a Hudson sliding through a dirt turn, women playing professional baseball. The rides and the dance hall have gone, but the place where the crowd sat is still there.

A timeline

• 1895 Electric railway joins South Bend and Mishawaka
• 1896 First game on the new diamond at Springbrook Park, 14 June
• 1899 A vaudeville theatre planned for the park
• 1903 The Green Stockings bring Central League ball to Springbrook
• 1904 Night game under portable lights, 28 August; matinees at the Springbrook Park Casino
• 1907 Park leased for ten years to the Interurban Amusement Company
• 1914 Sunday band concerts and picnic suppers
• 1916 Race track added
• 1924–25 Renamed Playland Park under Pete Redden
• 15 years later
• 1940 Last streetcars in South Bend and Mishawaka
• 1946 The Blue Sox move to Playland from Bendix Field
• 1951–52 Blue Sox pennant and two championships
• 1952 NASCAR Grand National race won by Tim Flock, 20 July
• 1960–61 Park closes; golf course follows
• 47 years later
• 2008 River Crossing student housing opens
• 2021 Blue Sox state historical marker dedicated

If you go

DocumentedThe South Bend Blue Sox marker stands on Ironwood Drive at River Crossing, on the Indiana University South Bend campus, where it can be read from the public way. The housing itself is home to students, so please respect their privacy.