The story
Welcome to New Paris
New Paris was laid out in 1838 by Isaac Abshire and Enoch Wright, two settlers from Preble County, Ohio, on the old state road south of Goshen. The Cincinnati, Wabash & Michigan made it a grain station in 1870 and the Wabash a junction in 1893.
Jackson Township, south of Goshen, was organized in May 1832, and Joseph Cowan was its first trustee. The first road laid out through it was the state road from Logansport to Goshen, surveyed by Mr. Crawford with Thomas Hall as his pilot, and it ran straight south through the site of New Paris. The first settler on the town site was Frederick Harriman, who built a double log cabin and a shop where he made spinning wheels. Abram Blanchard settled just east of town in 1836 and built the first brick house in the vicinity.
Isaac Abshire and Enoch Wright, both from Preble County, Ohio, owned 160 acres each on either side of the east–west road and each set aside part of his land for village lots; they laid out New Paris on sections 9 and 10 in 1838, and James R. McCord surveyed it. David Parrot of Goshen kept the first dry-goods store, Elkanah Hoffman was the first blacksmith, T. Divinnie the first tailor and hotel keeper, and W. C. Matchett the first physician; John McGrew taught some twenty pupils in the first log schoolhouse. The story of the first postmaster keeping the mail in a sugar bowl is told in both county histories.
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The 1881 history names that postmaster as Jacob McFadden and says he later moved to Kansas, where in 1856 he was set upon by ruffians and killed in his own house, which was burned over him, for his free-soil views. The Methodists built the first church in the village. Laban Lacy, who broke much of the land nearby, brought the neighborhood its first grain separator, from Buffalo.
The Cincinnati, Wabash & Michigan Railroad, later the Big Four, made New Paris a station in 1870, and it became a busy shipping point for grain, produce and livestock. In the year ending November 29, 1879, the elevator firm of Johnson & Son bought 183,614 bushels of wheat and paid out $225,824 for grain and clover seed, and also did a banking business. In the township, Rodibaugh & Son ran a woolen factory, the only one in the county, with looms worked by women, and the village itself was known for its wagons and carriages. In 1893 the Wabash Railroad crossed the Big Four here and New Paris became a junction.
The Farmer’s Exchange, a weekly farm paper, published its first issue at New Paris on November 5, 1926. The 2020 census counted 1,587 people in New Paris.