The Curious Tale Behind South Bend's Bridge to Nowhere

How a failed business venture left behind the most enduring curiosity in South Bend's City Cemetery

BY AARON HELMAN // POSTED JULY 30, 2024

Deep in the back pocket of South Bend's City Cemetery, behind rows of well-manicured stones that bear many of the same names as the streets that make up the downtown grid, there is a bridge that doesn't need to exist.

It's an adorable feature of the historic cemetery; a useless bridge that connects nothing to nowhere, that safely moves travelers from one side of a grassy field to another. The ditch that ran below that bridge has been filled for a century-and-a-half. If humans weren't a sentimental people, the bridge would have been removed a long time ago. Over the course of 150 years, dozens like it already have been.

But the bridge at the cemetery remains. It's the only one still standing, a symbol of failure and foolishness, and a reminder that for as long as people have had heroes, people have delighted in watching those heroes fail.

Alexis Coquillard was one of those heroes, known colloquially as the “father of South Bend.” I attended the elementary school that was named in his memory, and I spent the second grade learning about his exploits, his goodness, and his honor. They told us that Coquillard was a proud American, a bold capitalist, a giving servant, and a generous friend. They told us that Alexis Coquillard worked his tail off to help build the skeleton of the town that we called home. They told us that the Potawatomi Indians held him in such high esteem that those natives once offered to make Coquillard their chief.

But they never told us about the bridge.

It turns out that in 1837 Alexis Coquillard led the charge in an ambitious (if not geologically impossible) attempt to redirect the course of a pair of rivers. His belief was that he could build a racing canal between the Kankakee and St. Joseph Rivers; an effort that would create a water powered mill “equal if not superior to any establishment west of Rochester, New York.”

He was wrong.

After spending thousands and thousands of dollars to dig a canal and span it with bridges like the one in the cemetery, Coquillard must have watched with trembling disappointment as the water refused to move. There wasn't even a trickle of water from one river that moved into another. Further attempts to engineer a solution were fruitless, but what they lacked in results, they made up for in cost.

Coquillard was bankrupted by the venture and when his friend John Defrees offered to help him try to recover, Defrees was left bankrupted by it too. A historical marker at the bridge refers to the entire affair as “Coquillard's Folly,” but a better name might have been Coquillard's Foreclosure, because that's what happened next.

As condition of his insolvency, the State Bank seized wide swaths of Coquillard's land, subdivided his lots, and sold to homesteaders who continued to pour into the young city. The Near West Side (or West Washington) neighborhood was born from Coquillard's Foreclosure, and in fact; the original land deeds still refer to the area as the “Bank Outlot Subdivision.”

Joseph Bartlett's Home at 720 West Washington was the first of these. Later, the Olivers would build Copshaholm and the Studebakers would build Tippecanoe Place; monuments to proud and wealthy families, all constructed on the land that used to be Alexis Coquillard's.

But Coquillard still has his bridge and it's worth a visit to the South Bend City Cemetery to check it out. After all, it's the only collection of stones in a graveyard with nothing important underneath it.

Aaron Helman is an author, historian and adventurer from South Bend. You may have seen him around South Bend drinking coffee. Learn more about his work or check out his books at aaronhelman.com.