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N►s FW" 104004 awe AA"vW N& 1024. is Me) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet Section number 8 Page & 5t. Casimir Parish Historic District St. Joseph County IN NARRATIVE STATEMENT OF SIGNIFICANCE The St. Casimir's Parish Historic District is significant under Criterion A, as it is strongly associated with the three dominant industries in South Bend: the once -adjacent Oliver Chilled Plow Works to the east, Studebaker only a few blocks beyond. and Singer, just to the northwest across the railroad tracks. Its chief area of significance is its ethnic heritage; the district embodies the development and growth--andlater, the decline --of a Polish workingclass neighborhood and parish. Even today it is visually representative of a typical turn -of -the -century ethnic workingclass neighborhood. Here, too, significant events in regional religious history took place in 1914, the so-called Bloody Sunday riot at St. Casimir's Church and,the near - simultaneous founding in the neighborhood of South Bend's first and only Polish National Catholic Church, St. Mary of the Holy Rosary. The neighborhood comprising St. Casimir's Parish Historic District began to develop and grow immediately west of the Oliver Chilled Plow Works in the 1870s and 1880s. (Early on. houses had sprung up north of Sample along the south and southeast edges of the plant, but these quickly disappeared in the ensuing decades as Oliver grew.) Peopled primarily by Polish immigrants and their families, St. Casimir's parish was established in 1899 with the completion of the first church and school at the northwest corner of Webster and Fisher. It was the second Polish parish in the city; the first was St. Hedwig's, and a third Polish parish north of St. Casimir's followed immediately in 1900. (Its church, St. Stanislaus, was built on Brookfield.) At the time St. Casimir's was founded, approximately.seven thousand Polish immigrants lived in South Bend. and the neighborhood around St. Casimir's was growing rapidly. The nearby Oliver Chilled Plow Works and the Studebaker Brothers Manufacturing Company, only a short distance east on Sample, were the chief employers for the men in the neighborhood, soon joined by the Singer Manufacturing Company, which built a new plant at Olive and Division (today. Western Avenue) at the turn of the century. A thriving business district developed around Walnut and Dunham (replacing an earlier concentration several blocks to the east that was taken over by the expanding Oliver plant), only a block west of St. Casimir's church, but the neighborhood was also peppered with corner groceries and other shops, along with a goodly number of convivial taverns. For many decades several saloons especially convenient to the workers leaving -their shifts at Oliver stood on Arnold Street between Grace and Sample. is • •