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1859–2024
For a hundred sixty-five years the largest building of the town's first age stood on the Compton Street ground: the Methodist Collegiate Institute's brick pile of 1859, forty-four by seventy-five feet, two stories of brick raised for a college that the Schools section follows through its brief, earnest course. The measurements are the schools file's, from the institution's own record: a two-story brick building of 44 by 75 feet, built in 1859 for the institute that opened in 1861 — in a village of some six hundred people, a building on the scale of a county courthouse, and the physical measure of the town's educational ambition in the Michigan Road's last great decade. The building outlived the college by a century and a half, passing into the town's school and church uses across the generations — the present United Methodist congregation's own predecessor worshipped in its line — until its course closed in the present decade: the building was demolished in 2024, and its ground is Colfax Park, the town's newest public ground, named for the county's great son of the same Methodist century. The demolition is entered whole in the ledger below; the building is printed here at the size its record allows, which is the size of its footprint and its dates — no description of its elevations, its architect or its interior survives in any record read for this build, and none is invented.
Sources
- This build's Schools and The Story of New Carlisle — the institute, its building's date and dimensions, and the 2024 demolition and Colfax Park succession.