The story
Welcome to Roseland
Roseland is a small town on the old road from South Bend to Niles, between the city and the Michigan line, that voted to incorporate in January 1916. Today it sits at the Toll Road exit for Notre Dame, with a busy highway corridor, a town park and the start of the LaSalle Trail.
Roseland lies in Clay Township, the triangle of land east of the St. Joseph River and north of South Bend. Howard (1907) names Benjamin Potter, John Hague and William McCombs, who came in 1829, among the first settlers near the river in what was then Portage and later German Township; Chapman (1880) says the first families along the east bank were those of John Eyler, Lambert McCombs and John Weaver, a German Baptist preacher, and that the first school in the township was kept in Eyler’s house. Clay was set off as its own township in 1840 and named for Henry Clay.
The road north out of South Bend toward Niles ran through this ground, and Howard mentions Stephen Ullery’s little carding mill where a creek crossed “the Niles road north of Notre Dame.” On the 1875 county atlas the land that became Roseland is still farmland, divided among the owners whose names are printed on the Clay Township map. Chapman wrote in 1880 that Clay had no villages at all, “as it is conveniently and closely situated to South Bend.”
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By the 1910s a small suburb had grown up on the road. On January 25, 1916, the South Bend News-Times reported that “the community of Roseland” was voting that day on whether to incorporate, with the ballots cast at a grocery store on the Niles road. The election had been petitioned for by Otto F. Kintz and others the month before, and the paper reported that a majority were expected to vote yes. The town dates its incorporation to 1916, the year shown on its flag beside a pink rose.
The highway through town is now State Road 933, the old Dixie Highway, and the Indiana Toll Road crosses it here, which is why Roseland calls itself “The Gateway Town”: its exit is the one for Notre Dame and South Bend. The town says about sixty small businesses and restaurants, among them five hotels, line the 933 corridor, with homes on tree-lined streets to the east and west. Its park board looks after the ten-acre Roseland Park, Veterans Memorial Park and the first mile of the LaSalle Trail, a path on an old railroad bed meant to reach the state line. The 2020 census counted 854 people.