A museum in the building it documents: true of the second home, not of the third

the subject-building test, printed at its mixed result; the two-seats question printed unsettled

The test asks whether the museum sits inside its own subject, and in New Carlisle the answer changes with the home: the museum’s second home WAS the Jeremiah Service House — the 1860–61 Italianate house, also called the Old Republic, that the society itself rescued, interpreted and carried onto the record: condemned after some thirty years of vacancy, placed on Indiana Landmarks’ 10 Most Endangered list in 1998, taken by Historic New Carlisle as court-appointed receiver with a Landmarks loan, restored by years of fundraising and volunteer labor, listed on the National Register of Historic Places on 15 March 2000, and run by the society as a community event venue and bed-and-breakfast “with a small history museum” inside it. For that tenure, New Carlisle meets the floor’s test in its strongest form: a social-history museum seated in the documented historic house it exists to interpret. The present home fails the same test, and prints as failing it: 112 East Michigan Street is the former Miller’s Home Café, a documented piece of the town’s commercial past but not the museum’s subject — the museum documents the town, not the café. The house itself has since left the society’s hands: Indiana Landmarks records that the group, deciding it had become too focused on one building, sold the Old Republic to a preservation-minded local couple for their home, and the Tribune of June 2026 states it “is now in private hands.”Tribune places at 112 East Michigan, in a house the same paper calls privately held. Whether an office remains in the summer kitchen beside a museum downtown is not stated in any publication reached; both forms print, neither is conformed, and the question is banked as a delta candidate in this wave’s closures file. The house’s address conflict stands as banked and is not resolved here: the Register listing form gives 302 East Michigan Street; other files, the film-tour record among them, give 304.

Sources:

1. Indiana Landmarks, 10 Most Endangered success stories: Old Republic (the 1998 listing; the receivership and loan; the restored house as “a community event venue and B&B, with a small history museum”; the later sale to a local couple, the proceeds continuing the society’s downtown work) — the second home’s whole course.
2. National Register record, Jeremiah Service House (built 1860–1861; Italianate; ref. 00000216; listed 15 March 2000; 302 E. Michigan St. per the listing form) — the address printed as the form gives it, the 304 form standing in other files, unresolved.
3. South Bend Tribune, 28 June 2026, read at the page (the Service House “served as a museum and community event space”; the Old Republic “now in private hands”; the museum at 112 E. Michigan St., formerly Miller’s Home Café).
4. The banked sources pass of this build, both seat tellings quoted in the article (“holds the Jeremiah Service House as its seat”; “offices itself in the summer kitchen of the Jeremiah Service House”) — printed together, unconformed.