The story
Welcome to Notre Dame
Notre Dame is the community of the University of Notre Dame and Saint Mary’s College, just north of South Bend, with its own post office since 1851. It grew from a missionary chapel by the twin lakes of St. Mary and St. Joseph, where Father Edward Sorin and his companions arrived on a snowy November day in 1842.
The ground was mission country long before the university. Howard (1907), drawing on older Catholic writers, says the lakes were known to the early French missionaries as Ste. Marie des Lacs, and that Father Stephen T. Badin, coming among the Potawatomi in 1829, bought a section of land here and built a chapel on the little St. Mary’s lake, wanting the spot for a future Catholic college. The university dates Badin’s log chapel to 1831; it later burned, and the replica Log Chapel stands on the same spot, where Badin and other missionary priests are buried. Howard writes that Father De Seille and Father Petit, the last missionaries before Sorin, rest in the church at Notre Dame.
Father Edward Sorin, a priest of the new Congregation of Holy Cross from Le Mans in France, sailed for America in August 1841 with six brothers, landing at New York on September 13. On November 26, 1842, Howard writes, he founded the university “on the Lakes of Notre Dame”; the university says he and seven companions took possession of 524 snow-covered acres, arriving with $310. The Indiana legislature chartered the university on January 15, 1844. On April 24, 1855, Sorin founded St. Mary’s Academy for girls on the bank of the St. Joseph a mile to the west, now Saint Mary’s College.
Read the full story
Chapman (1880) describes the university as owning the largest farm in Harris Township, on drained marsh, where it raised beef and milk for its students, and the 1875 county atlas shows the great main building with its small dome, the tall-spired church and the formal gardens. On April 23, 1879, a fire destroyed the main building in about three hours, with no loss of life. It was rebuilt in time for classes that fall, with 4.3 million bricks, and its dome was covered in gold for the first time.
The community around the campus is a census-designated place split between Clay and Portage Townships. Its post office, which began in 1851, is now in Hammes Mowbray Hall. In May 1924 about five hundred students confronted a Ku Klux Klan rally in South Bend; Father Theodore Hesburgh led the university from 1952 to 1987, and women were admitted for the first time in 1972. The 2020 census counted 7,234 people.