We Don't Know Who Quinn Road Is Named For

According to the historical record, John Quinn was a notable revolutionary patriot. He wasn't.

BY AARON HELMAN // POSTED APRIL 15, 2026

Drive south of South Bend. Keep going for a while. Don't take one of the bigger roads. Stick to Miami Trail or Redwood. That's how you'll find Quinn Road, or at least sections of it, broken into chunks and describing a dotted line across the southern extreme of St. Joseph County.

Quinn Road is one of the three 'Q' roads that's officially a part of the county's alphabetical grid. Quarles Road and Quincy Road are the others. Along with that official grid, there's also an official history that goes with the road's namesake:

For more than a hundred years, St. Joseph County has told that Quinn Road is “named after Revolutionary War Patriot John Quinn.”

It wasn't.

Here's the thing about notable patriots. We know who they are. They signed things. They got statues. They made it into our history books. If Indiana was going to name a road after a participant in a war that ended more than a century ago, they would have chosen one of the famous ones.

As for the forgotten heroes? Well, by the time Quinn Road was named — sometime after 1910 — the forgotten heroes had already been forgotten.

You could fill whole libraries with the history of America's founding period and the stories of heroism and sacrifice during the Revolutionary War. There's more written and recorded about that slice of American history than a person could read in a lifetime, but if they managed to get through all of it, they still wouldn't find John Quinn.

So if Quinn Road isn't named after a Revolutionary figure, then who is it named after?

The short answer is we don't know.

But we've got a list of candidates.

To find the right John Quinn, I dug through the archives of old South Bend newspapers, working backward from 1918, because that's when we find the first mention of Quinn Road. I was trying to find a John Quinn who seemed like the kind of person a county would want to commemorate with a road.

I found several John Quinns. None of them were obviously that person. Some of them were decidedly not that person.

It was the most fun I've had doing research in a long time.

Here's the list:

• It could be John Quinn, a relatively obscure local man who was elected as a delegate to South Bend's Republican primary in 1884.
• It could be John Quinn from LaPorte who lost his fingers during an accident with a cane crusher in 1875.
• Or it could be a completely different John Quinn who lost his fingers during an accident with a punching machine at the Studebaker factory in 1897.
• It's probably not the John Quinn who lost his thumb in an 1895 train derailment.
• It could be the Reverend John P. Quinn, a Notre Dame graduate who went on to become the rector at St. John's Church in Peoria, Illinois. This John Quinn was noted as a brilliant orator, and he delivered the commencement address at Notre Dame in 1903.
• It's certainly not the John Quinn who murdered his wife with an axe in 1877.
• Nor is it the John Quinn who was likely shot to death by his wife in 1911.

If I had to take a guess, I'd point to Reverend Quinn and his family as the most likely namesakes for Quinn Road. The Reverend was around South Bend quite a bit during the years when the road earned its name, and the men in charge of naming it might have plucked the ‘Q' name they needed from the newspapers — where Reverend Quinn appeared often enough to be recognizable, if not quite famous.

Or it could be someone else entirely.

The men dropping roads into the alphabetical grid struggled to find good names for the ‘Q's. That's how we wound up with Quarles Road, named after an obscure and derided English poet who died in 1644. The Quinn we're looking for might be anyone found in an old encyclopedia or almanac who sounded distinguished enough for a road sign.

I suppose that means it could even be a Revolutionary War Patriot no one's ever heard of.

But probably not.

Do you know anything about the namesake of Quinn Road?
Tell us about it!