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1875–1920 · temperance as the town's anti-crime institution
Where other towns of this build fought the saloon in court, Olive Township organized the second-largest temperance lodge in Indiana. Olive Branch Lodge No. 149 of the Independent Order of Good Templars was organized in New Carlisle 4 January 1875 by Grand Worthy Chief Templar J. J. Talbott. Its first officers were A. T. Evans, Mary Hoyt, Josie Service, Eli Miller, Martha Lyda, E. H. Harris, John Grigg, Hattie Flanegin, Libbie Albright, Thos. M. Membership ran 95 in November 1878 and 143 in August 1880, "second in size in the State." The lodge is the township's temperance institution entire in the records read: no saloon prosecution, local-option fight or liquor conviction is attributed to this ground in the sources reached for this build, across the whole dry era to 1920 and through it, and that negative prints at the strength of those sources — the county histories, the lodge's own boasting, and the appellate record searched — with the wartime and Prohibition stills of local legend expressly left unprinted, as legend.
Sources
- Chapman (1880), Olive Township chapter, pp. 768–769 (Olive Branch Lodge No. 149: organization, officers, membership, state rank).