We Found the First Personal Ad in the History of South Bend...
...and we think we know who wrote it.
BY AARON HELMAN // POSTED DECEMBER 16, 2024
In the pioneer days of 1832, long before swipes and likes dictated the rhythms of romance, courtship was a far more practical and often challenging affair. If you think dating is tough now, try being a bachelor man in South Bend during the town's earliest years. You're a lonely guy, your town is filled with lonely guys, you know everyone who lives there, and you know that not a single one of them is an unaccompanied woman.
Maybe the only thing worse to imagine is the plight of the one single woman who might have had the misfortune to wander into all of that.
South Bend, then a small but growing settlement, was filled with families and bachelors who had ventured westward in search of opportunity. However, the imbalance of demographics made finding a wife a difficult task for bachelors. Single women were few and far between, and the usual pathways to courtship - church socials, family introductions, or community gatherings - weren't always reliable in such a sparsely populated area. For many men, the odds of romance felt as daunting as clearing a field or building a homestead.
If you wanted to find a mate, you could leave town or you could wait for your friend's daughters to grow up. Trust me, I didn't enjoy writing that last sentence any more than you enjoyed reading it.
It's in this context that South Bend's first personal ad appeared in The St. Joseph Beacon on January 25, 1832. The ad marked a bold and somewhat unconventional approach to romance, revealing the creative lengths people would go to in their search for companionship. While we live in a time dominated by dating apps and matchmaking algorithms, it's refreshing and even a little charming to reflect on a world where a single column in a printed paper could serve as the starting point for love.
I discovered this paragraph in the old newspaper while working on a quest to identify and place every public building in South Bend in the early 1830s. But like any good consumer of historical gossip, I immediately put aside my work to ascertain the lonely man advertising for companionship. I didn't think it would be a very difficult quest.
There weren't very many people living in South Bend in 1832, and far fewer of them were single, eligible men. There were maybe a dozen of them, and even fewer of those possessed the “means of gentel living”. A small list now was narrowed significantly, but unfortunately, none had the initials C.C.H. That meant that our Romeo was using an alias or a pseudonym to disguise his true identity and to hide his desperation!
But who would do such a thing? And who would have such a friend at the Post Office to funnel mail to him through a false moniker? And what kind of pseudonym is C.C.H.?
C.C.H. turns out to have been a very poor pseudonym.
Those letters are simply the reversed initials of Horatio C. Chapin, South Bend General Store owner, church founder, county historian, and builder of the historic 1857 Horatio Chapin House on Park Avenue.
But before all of that, he was just a man with a store and a full heart that he wanted to share with someone. He wanted the same thing we all want, a loving relationship with an educated and amiable person who independently holds a moderate fortune.
The same day that his personal ad ran in The Beacon was - probably not coincidentally - the first day that he took out paid advertising in the paper for his own business.
