Why Do They Call It Chalfant Street?

The Chalfants were some of South Bend's earliest pioneers, and their farm later became the region's most famous acreage

BY AARON HELMAN // POSTED OCTOBER 27, 2025

When Evan Chalfant came to town in 1832 with his young family, there wasn't much of a town to come to. South Bend was thirty years from being christened a city, and the name for the place was barely two years old — having been officially changed from Southold in 1830. Native Americans outnumbered white people, and almost all of the white people were involved directly or indirectly in the Indian trade.

But the fur trade wasn't really Evan Chalfant's business. Instead, his family was a part of the second white migration to the southernmost bend of the St. Joseph River. He traveled with a small Quaker parade of agriculturalists who were poised to clear and originate the farmland that would soon become synonymous with Indiana.

And for a long while, that's exactly what they did.

Evan Chalfant was born in Pennsylvania in 1796, but he was made to roam, and he found likeminded travel companions at the Friends Meetings of his Quaker Church. There was his good friend, Samuel Ireland, himself a county road namesake. Then there was Thomas Bulla, a man whose name dots a few broken South Bend streets, and one who has become most famous for running an Underground Railroad Station almost literally in Father Sorin's own personal backyard.

Chalfant might have been the quietest of the bunch, but he was right there with them. He married Bulla's sister, Anna, in 1819; and moved in lockstep with the Bullas for the remainder of his days. The Chalfant homestead directly abutted the Bulla farm, and the two made for some of Notre Dame's earliest neighbors.

Chalfant's brushes with local fame were few and fleeting. He was a founding member of the Agricultural Society of St. Joseph County and occasionally made headlines in the newspaper when he grew a particularly large onion or an extravagantly large beet. Chalfant was a dedicated Whig, but he did not ever run for office.

For the most part, Evan Chalfant was a successful, quiet, and humble farmer. But this was the 1800s, and in the 1800s, heartbreak was never terribly far away.

Evan Chalfant was fifty years old before his life was visited by misfortune, but once the tragedies started coming, they didn't really stop. In 1847, his son and namesake Evan Jr. was killed in the Mexican-American War. It doesn't appear the body was ever recovered.

A few years later, Anna died, leaving Evan Chalfant a widow in 1849. He wasn't suited for singleness, though, and remarried a few months later to a woman named Maria Palmer. That marriage was not a successful one. Less than a month after the wedding, Maria absconded from the home. Evan ran a series of notices in the local newspaper, but it does not appear that she ever returned.

Evan Chalfant would not marry a third time, but he would live another 20 years, dying in 1870 at the age of 73. He was remembered by his neighbors as “a quiet, peaceable, and beloved farmer.”

That left his oldest son, Thomas Bulla Chalfant, to run the family farm. Thomas picked up where his dad left off, growing large vegetables and chasing off larger racoons, at least to hear the newspapers tell it. There was a fire at the family home and then another, but that was pretty much par for the course in the 1870s, the kind of the thing that just happened sometimes.

Probably.

By the 1870s, the family had its black sheep. A Chalfant grandson had become something of an arsonist. In fact, he'd been arrested (along with George Coquillard!) after a particularly destructive incident. When the pair skipped town after making bail, their families were left out the money.

But all that the rest of the Chalfants could do was to keep farming, so that's what they did, at least until Thomas died in 1892, marking the end of an era in South Bend. Thomas had been 12 when he arrived in South Bend all the way back in 1832, and he had been just about the last of the old settlers that the town had left.

As for the future of the family farm, the third generation of Chalfants was more interested in real estate than agriculture, and the asset that they held was in very high demand. When the property was first floated for sale in 1892, purchasers lined up for the chance to get at 400 premium acres located right between the bursting seems of the growing city of South Bend and the growing University of Notre Dame.

There were a lot of ideas that were floated for the land — housing developments, parks, cemeteries, even a beer garden. None of those came to fruition.

In the end, the best offer didn't come from the developers, and it didn't come from the city. It came from the University of Notre Dame.

You might not know where the Chalfant Farm used to be, but you've probably walked across it before:

For a while, Notre Dame students farmed the land, a kind of requirement if they wanted to continue to feed their growing student body. But a few years later, the flat grassy part of the farm became a recreation space, then an early football field surronded by wooden bleachers.

It hasn't really stopped growing ever since.