The story
Welcome to Olive Township
Olive Township, at the western end of the county, takes in the broad Terre Coupee Prairie, which Howard thought the finest in all the county. It was named in 1832 for Olive Stanton Vail, a settler’s young wife, and it holds the first Methodist society in the county, two vanished towns, New Carlisle and the Studebaker woods.
The first settlers came in 1830, a colony largely from Warren County, Ohio, who came by way of Niles or Crawfordsville to avoid the Kankakee and Grapevine marshes. Judge Lucius Hubbard listed Jacob and Israel Rush, John, Barzilla and Gamaliel Druliner, the Egberts, the Adamses, Samuel Garwood, Charles Vail, Garrett and Henry Nickerson, William White and John Carskaddon. Jacob Rush, Chapman (1880) says, turned the first furrow and helped raise the first cabin, his brother Israel’s, and Israel Rush became the first justice of the peace. The first election was held in John Druliner’s log house, with Charles Vail, a Quaker, as inspector; he would not administer an oath and had the election board affirm instead.
Olive was formed on May 6, 1832, out of everything in the county west of Range 2 East, and lost ground later to Warren, Greene, Liberty and Lincoln; it is still the second largest township. The story of its name, told by Jesse Haines, is that one evening in 1831 Judge Egbert, at supper with Charles and Olive Vail, declared that this, “the best and most beautiful township in St. Joseph county,” should be named for Vail’s “girl wife.” Hubbard adds that the Vails’ was the first marriage among the white settlers, though Chapman disputes it. Terre Coupee Prairie, the “cut-out” prairie, runs six or seven miles across the township.
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The first Methodist society in the county was formed at Paul Egbert’s house near Terre Coupee in 1830, and its church at Hamilton, built in 1839–40, was the best then north of the Wabash. When the Black Hawk war scare reached the prairie in 1832, settlers began a stockade fort near the timber on John Druliner’s land; the blockhouses were never finished, and the palisades went for firewood. Towns came and went: Plainfield, platted in December 1833, Palestine in 1834 and Hamilton, or Terre Coupee, named for a hotel there, all faded, while Richard R. Carlisle’s New Carlisle of 1835 survived.
In 1865, Chapman says, Fred G. Miller brought the first company of Polish settlers to Indiana, most of them to the timbered marsh of Olive, where by 1880 thirty-five families had cleared twenty to thirty acres apiece. The Terre Coupee Anti-Horse-Thief Association, formed about 1853, boasted that in twenty-five years fewer than thirty horses had been stolen in its territory and all but two recovered. In 1926 Studebaker bought 850 acres near New Carlisle for a proving ground, now Bendix Woods County Park. The township had 1,998 people in 1900; the 2020 census counted 4,364.