The first merchants — the Service store and the Borden store

1830s–1880 · CHAPMAN FIRST-HAND

The town's first durable merchant house was a store that turned into a bank. J. H. Service — Jeremiah Service, born in New York on 15 November 1812 — settled in New Carlisle, worked at brick-making two years, and then, Chapman records, "kept store in New Carlisle 30 years, except 1843–'6 he was in Buchanan," before turning to banking in the last four years before 1880. His son George H. Service, born in the county in 1848, carried the combined house into its full form: in Chapman's words "banker, merchant and grain-dealer," and in the year before the history was written, 1879, he "bought and shipped a million bushels of wheat, besides attending to his mercantile and banking business, buying other grain, etc." The store and the private bank stood together in a frame building on the site the First National Bank later occupied; the banking course is carried whole in this build's banks file. Around the Service house the first mercantile generation forms at sketch strength: T. L. Borden kept a store on Michigan Street in whose upper room Terre Coupee Lodge No. 204, F. & A.M., organized on 24 July 1856, and the lodge met over Borden's store until 1862, then over J. H. Service's store until 1876, when the new brick block was erected — one-third of its expense defrayed by the lodge, which held exclusive control of the upper story. Chapman also records the township's first business center, and it was not New Carlisle: Hamilton, at the center of Terre Coupee Prairie, "was the great business center for this part of St. Joseph county" in the church-building year 1838, with a grocery still standing there in 1880 — "since the railroad has been built through the county and made a station at New Carlisle, Hamilton has run down."

Sources:

1. Chapman (1880), Olive Township chapter, pp. 768–770 (Terre Coupee Lodge; the 1876 brick block), pp. H. Service and George H. Service sketches, pp. 783–784: store tenure, Buchanan years, the million bushels of 1879. Read first-hand.
2. Historic New Carlisle's history of the Service house, carried in a January 2018 reprint (sweethousedreams.blogspot.com): the dry-goods store and the Service and Son Bank housed together in the frame building on the later First National Bank site; George Service taking the store over in 1867 while Jeremiah turned to banking. Secondary strength; the carrier is named because the society's own telling is the source.