South Bend's Fifth Mayor Was a Terrible Poet
It was shocking when Lucius Tong won the mayor's office in 1878 and more shocking when he lost it two years later.
BY AARON HELMAN // POSTED JULY 7, 2026
Sometime around 1860, a Notre Dame student got a detention.
He didn't think he deserved it, so he appealed. First to his teacher and then to the dean, and at last to the desk of Father Edward Sorin — the priest who founded the university.
We don't know whether he won, the appeal, but we do know that he was the kind of fellow who would rather spend six hours appealing a punishment than spend two hours serving it.
His name was Lucius Tong. Twenty years later, he'd be the mayor of South Bend.
He'd also be a bookkeeper, a lawyer, a professor, a college dean, a law school director, a real estate agent, an insurance salesman, a bank trustee, and the founder of a temperance society.
And yes, he was a truly terrible poet.
A subscription to the News-Times is always free.
Enter your email address and get new issues straight to your inbox.
Tong was born in Carroll, Ohio, in 1842, into a family so economical it had trimmed its own name to save effort: the Tongues became the Tongs on the crossing from England, two letters left in the Atlantic as surplus.
He came to South Bend in 1859 to study bookkeeping, and it suited him perfectly — the columns, the ledgers, the faith that careful work makes everything balance. He believed in order, and above all in process. See the detention.
He graduated in 1861 and stayed on as a professor of bookkeeping. A decade later he came back for a law degree and climbed until he ran two departments at once — Dean of the Commercial Faculty and Director of the Law Department, as if one title were a waste of a good man. Then he opened a downtown office on the side, married, built a house, and raised a family. If Lucius Tong ever had an idle afternoon, he didn't record it, and he recorded everything.
And then there was the poetry.
In 1875, Tong rose at the annual banquet of the St. Joseph Bar Association and recited a poem of his own. It was meant as a tribute to the legal profession. It was dreadful, and it came with a verse for every member of the bar, by name, including this gem:
Then Alvin Dunbar, who has long done bar,
Where his honor has never received the least scar;
Time watches his chance, sir, but all the world knows it;
His mortgage is safe until Death shall foreclose it.
By 1878, South Bend needed a mayor. Alexander Napier Thomas had declined to run for reelection and was already on his way to a new life in Kansas. Lucius Tong had never held political office before. He made himself a candidate for the job and won the election handily.
The city loved him. Tong, a Republican, earned the esteem and adoration of the Republican newspapers, which was to be expected. What was unexpected was that the Democratic newspapers seemed like they loved him even more.
When it came time to run for a second term, the Democrats couldn't find anyone to run against Tong. The city's Democrat paper praised him in print as the kind of mayor who was “void of offense toward God and man”. They wished they could run him as a Democrat. Two weeks before the election, Tong was running unopposed and had the endorsements of the Republican and Democrat newspapers.
Which is what made it so weird when he lost the election to Dr. Levi Ham. No one saw it coming. Lucius Tong never ran for office again.
He is buried in the Cedar Grove Cemetery at the University of Notre Dame.
