Dealerships — the older record, tested

1903–2026 · THE TEST AND ITS RESULT

New Carlisle enters the automobile age repairing cars, not selling them — and the record reached never shows it selling them. The leg's test runs on the older record at full size. The horse-trade ground is whole: the Brummitt Mercantile Company's "vehicles" line of 1903, Charles C. Carney's harness shop and S. I. Lauver's livery in the 1916 roll, Ordung & Cunningham's wagonmaking beside them. The automobile's first forms in the same roll are service forms: Ray V. Evans' garage and Orville E. Smith, auto repairer — and no automobile sales entry of any make stands in the canvass. The modern canvass agrees: the business association's 2026 roll carries no franchised or independent dealership, and no dealership name attaches to the town in any source. The verdict prints at its true size: dealerships tested negative at directory strength for 1916 and for 2026, with the middle of the century — the decades when a small highway town most plausibly held a Ford or Chevrolet agency — untested, because the town's own newspapers of those years stand behind the paywalled and unindexed record. That middle is a named gap (GAP-NC3-DEALER-1's note), settler the New Carlisle Gazette and New Prairie Town Crier advertising record and the 1949-pattern directory canvass, and it stays open rather than filled by inference.

Sources:

1. Polk (1916–17), New Carlisle entry, read whole: garage and auto repairer present; no sales entry.
2. New Carlisle Business and Community Association directory, read whole November 2026: no dealership.
3. Brummitt biography (as above): the 1903 "vehicles" line at biography strength.