On your left stands a rough fieldstone church with a cross-gabled roof, broad limestone-trimmed arches, and a sturdy corner bell tower.
This is the former First Presbyterian Church, raised in eighteen eighty-eight in the Richardsonian Romanesque style, a weighty, rounded style that delights in thick stone walls and deep arches. It cost about thirty-five thousand dollars to complete, roughly a million dollars in today’s money, and South Bend paid for it in a strikingly equal partnership: one third came from the congregation, one third from industrialist James Oliver, and one third from J. M. Studebaker. Even the gifts inside carried family signatures. Oliver’s children donated the organ, and Grace Studebaker presented a Tiffany Cross.
The great treasure here is the enormous stained-glass window, a Palladian design, meaning a tall three-part window with a dominant center. On your phone, the purple and blue glass glows across the eastern front. On the Lafayette Street side, the glass holds a more intimate secret: the likeness of Reverend George Keller, remembered as the congregation’s first pastor.
Yet the story began long before this stone sanctuary. In eighteen thirty-four, Horatio Chapin and William Stanfield gathered worshippers in a log schoolhouse, and the first nursery took shape, rather charmingly, inside Chapin’s dry goods store. Later, after the congregation moved to its new Colfax Avenue church in nineteen fifty-two, this building carried on with new lives, including a period as the Peoples’ Church. Today, Ambassadors for Christ cares for it and helps preserve some of the finest stained glass left in South Bend.
One final note feels fitting here. In two thousand nine, historians searching for early church records opened a steel strongbox and found mold-damaged handwritten books nearly lost forever. Conservation saved them, including an eighteen forty-eight resolution in which this congregation addressed slavery directly. So the building before you is not merely handsome stone; it is a witness.
If you plan to return, it generally opens Monday through Thursday from eight to four, and on Sunday from eight-thirty to eleven-thirty.
