Father Sorin and the Frozen Ground
Near South Bend, Indiana
On November twenty-sixth, eighteen forty-two, a thirty-year-old French priest named Edward Sorin arrived at a frozen piece of land north of South Bend with eight brothers of the Congregation of Holy Cross. He had traveled from France, then from a mission in the Indiana countryside, following an offer from the bishop of Vincennes: five hundred twenty-four acres of land and a small log chapel near two small lakes. The land had belonged to the Potawatomi, who had been removed four years earlier.
Sorin described his first sight of the property in a letter: everything was frozen, and yet it all appeared so beautiful. He named the settlement Notre Dame du Lac, Our Lady of the Lake. He intended to build a university there.
The Indiana legislature granted the University of Notre Dame an official charter on January fifteenth, eighteen forty-four. Classes had already begun in the log chapel. Sorin ran the institution as president until eighteen sixty-five, then as Provincial Superior for the rest of his long life.
On April twenty-third, eighteen seventy-nine, fire destroyed the Main Building entirely. Father Corby, who was rector at the time, announced that the university would likely have to close. Sorin, sixty-five years old, gathered the community and reportedly said: if it were all gone, I should not give up. Construction of a new building began on May seventeenth, eighteen seventy-nine. It was completed and reopened for the fall semester that same year. That building still stands.
Sorin insisted on gilding the new dome in real gold. Some in the community thought it extravagant. He prevailed. The dome rises one hundred eighty-seven feet, topped by a nineteen-foot statue of Mary weighing four thousand pounds.
Father Sorin died in eighteen ninety-three, fifty-one years after he stood on frozen ground and decided to build something lasting.
