The Jeremiah Service House, or Old Republic: the town's mansion, 1860–1861

Built 1860–1861; listed 15 March 2000

The one house in town with a federal file of its own is the merchant's house at 302 East Michigan Street — a two-story Italianate brick dwelling of 1860–1861, square in plan, crowned with the most recognizable silhouette in New Carlisle: a central cupola topped by a Turkish-style onion dome. The nomination's description, as the listing record carries it, gives the house its particulars: full-width front porch, paired scroll-sawn brackets under the eaves, the cupola and its onion dome above all, and two surviving outbuildings counted as contributing resources in their own right — an ice house and a smokehouse, the domestic machinery of a prosperous 1860 household, preserved with the house. The address itself carries one of the build's small standing conflicts: the listing's own address is 302 East Michigan Street, while a 304 form stands in the secondary telling — both printed, the Register's form governing the citation. The house was Jeremiah Service's: J. H. Service of the people and banks legs, the merchant in whose store the town's first bank kept its counter, the man who gave five hundred dollars toward the Methodists' college — and its farmland once ran to over a hundred acres behind it, on the society's account, so that the "house" of 1860 was the seat of a small estate at the town's east edge. Its modern course is the town's preservation success: the house is an official project of Save America's Treasures, the federal preservation program; it stands as a single-site historic district under the town's own Historic Review Board; and it is the museum seat of Historic New Carlisle, the local society — Jeremiah Service's house become the town's memory of itself, which is why this section prints it at full nomination size. The house also answers, in part, the checklist's oldest-houses item, taken up next: it is the oldest house in town that the record names with a date and a file.

Sources

1. Nomination, Jeremiah Service House (Kopkowski, August 1999), and the NRIS record for ref. 00000216 — the building's description, dates and address, read.
2. Historic New Carlisle (the local history society) — the Old Republic name, the farmland, and the house's museum course, at the society's strength.
3. This build's Sources — the 302/304 address conflict as banked; Notable People and Banks — the Service family and the bank in the store.