Levi Ham: South Bend's Oldest Mayor

He had quit politics four decades earlier and spent years predicting his own death. The city elected him anyway.

BY AARON HELMAN // POSTED AUGUST 7, 2026

In 1868, a South Bend physician named Levi Ham stood before the fellows in his Masonic Lodge and delivered a short speech about his own impending death.

He explained that he was getting older. It was inevitable now. His work with the lodge would soon be finished, and it would not be long before his funeral cortege would wend its way to the little churchyard, where he would be left in silence to become food and companion for the worm.

More than a decade later, the city elected him its sixth mayor.

No one saw it coming.

Not even Ham.

Levi Ham spent his early life frolicking in the glow of post-Revolutionary America. He was there in 1825 when they laid the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument. He met Daniel Webster and the Marquis de Lafayette. By 1880, revolutionary figures like those stood as relics of the past, and so did Levi Ham.

That brush with history might have inspired Ham to pursue politics. After earning a medical degree and practicing in Maine, he got himself elected to the state senate, and presided over the body while it negotiated a border dispute with Michigan.

Then in 1839, he decided not to run for another term. He retired from politics...

...forty years before he became South Bend's mayor.

 

 

The 1880 mayoral election was not supposed to be close. For a while there, it looked like there wouldn't even be a race. The incumbent, Lucius Tong, was young, handsome, educated, and enormously popular.

Two weeks before the election, he held endorsements from both the Republican and Democrat newspapers. The Democrats were having trouble finding anyone to run.

Two weeks before the election, Levi Ham wasn't even in the race.

Then Ham won. By a lot.

The short version of how that happened is that South Bend's booming Polish population had transformed themselves into the kind of bloc that could turn an election without any of the English-language papers seeming to notice.

But whatever it was, South Bend was now in the hands of a 74-year-old man who had spent the previous decade being eulogized, occasionally by himself.

Ham governed like a man with no time to waste, because actuarially speaking, that's exactly what he was. No council in the city's history met as often as his did.

Four years after he became South Bend's mayor, the Tribune ran an item congratulating the mayor on his 76th birthday. They ran a correction the next day. He was actually 78.

The newspaper called him a man who had “lived beyond his limit.”

They meant it as a compliment.

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.