The story
Welcome to New Carlisle
New Carlisle sits on a rise at the edge of Terre Coupee Prairie, on the old stage road across the prairie. Richard R. Carlisle laid it out in 1835 with a hundred-foot main street and side streets named like Philadelphia’s, and its brick business blocks are now a historic district.
Before it was a town, the hill belonged to a man named Bourissau and his family. Howard (1907) calls him Lazarus Bourissau, a Frenchman with an Indian wife who had obtained the land from the Indians; Chapman (1880) calls him “Bursaw,” and Granville Woolman, who arrived as a boy in 1834, remembered only one cabin on the hill, where the Christian church later stood, belonging to “a family by the name of Bourissau, a half-breed Indian.” After Bourissau’s death his children sold the land to Richard R. Carlisle, a restless sportsman and traveler who, both histories say, did not stay in the town he named and died in Philadelphia.
Carlisle’s plat, surveyed by county surveyor Tyra W. Bray and acknowledged on August 15, 1835, lay on the northeast quarter of section 34, Township 38 North, Range 1 West. Michigan Street was a hundred feet wide, and the cross streets, Front, Chestnut, Cherry, Filbert, Arch and Race, sixty feet. On March 15, 1837, Carlisle filed a much larger plat, printed and lithographed in New York with a view of the town looking over the prairie, evidently to sell lots in the East. Richard Cranmer built the hotel in 1836, and under Joseph Ivens it became known as one of the best houses on the stage line.
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Mrs. R. J. Pidge, who came in January 1847, remembered a hotel, a dry-goods store and a post office kept in a blacksmith shop, but no church, no schoolhouse and no railroad; Schuyler Colfax’s mother, Mrs. Mathews, had kept a Sunday school in her own house. The Lake Shore railroad came through in 1851 and, Howard says, “secured the stability of the little municipality.” The Methodists built their church in 1858–59, and in 1859 the same church built the brick New Carlisle Collegiate Institute, which opened in 1861 and was later bought for the town school. The Christian church was organized in 1868 by Ira J. Chase, later governor of Indiana.
On June 7, 1866, Samuel C. Lancaster and thirty-one others petitioned for incorporation; the vote was 44 to 6, and the county board ordered the town incorporated in September 1866. Chapman praises the town for building its waterworks in 1879, “when everything was cheap.” George M. Fountain and George H. Alward founded the New Carlisle Gazette on February 6, 1880. The town had 597 people in 1900.
The South Shore electric line stopped at New Carlisle until 1994. In 1926 Studebaker bought 850 acres of farmland near the town for a proving ground, where the Civilian Conservation Corps planted more than 8,000 pines in 1938 as a living sign; the clubhouse and woods are now Bendix Woods County Park. The business blocks on Michigan Street were listed on the National Register as the New Carlisle Historic District in 1992. The 2020 census counted 1,891 people.