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1897–1916 · THE HARDWARE HOUSE
The second anchor house began as a hardware store with a bank in the back. The Brummitt brothers established a private bank in the spring of 1897 inside their hardware building — it ran until 1900, when it was incorporated as the First National Bank of New Carlisle (the bank's course is carried whole in the banks file) — and in 1903 the hardware firm took corporate form as the Brummitt Mercantile Company, Mark L. Brummitt president and treasurer, handling "coal, lumber, grain, farm implements, vehicles and hardware" at a volume the firm's biography puts at about $40,000 a year. The vehicle line matters to this section: in 1903 "vehicles" meant the horse-drawn trade, and the Brummitt house is the ground the automobile trade later grew on — or, in this town, did not. By the 1916 directory the hardware trade on Michigan Street had passed to other names (Guy R. Smith, hardware and farm implements; Zeck Bros, hardware and lumber), and no Brummitt firm stands in the town's roll; the record reached does not date the Mercantile Company's end, and its closing is banked as a named gap's note, settler the county-history and directory run between 1907 and 1916.
Sources:
- Biography of Mark L. Brummitt, county-history biographical volume, transcribed at inportercounty.org (Porter County GenWeb): the 1897 private bank in the hardware building, the 1900 incorporation, A. R. Brummitt cashier, the 1903 Mercantile Company and its lines and volume. Read first-hand at transcription strength.
- Polk (1916–17), New Carlisle entry, read whole: Smith and Zeck Bros in the hardware lines; no Brummitt entry.