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1917 · THE STANDARD CARNEGIE ENUMERATION, READ AT THE ROW
New Carlisle's library building was Carnegie money, granted in the last season of the giving: $9,000, dated September 14, 1917, for a building at 124 East Michigan Street. The grant stands in the standard enumeration of Indiana's Carnegie libraries — 164 buildings from 156 grants statewide, more than any other state — at its own row: "New Carlisle — granted Sep 14, 1917 — $9,000 — 124 E. Michigan St. — Currently houses town offices." Indiana's grants ran from Goshen's in 1901 to Lowell's in 1918, so New Carlisle's came within the program's final year, when the Corporation's terms were long standardized: the community furnished the site and bound itself to support the library by taxation at not less than a tenth of the grant each year — the promise the missing founding instrument (above) must have embodied. The photographic census of Indiana's surviving Carnegies concurs in its caption: "New Carlisle – Town Hall/Carnegie Library, 1917 (St. Joseph County)." Between grant and opening, four years passed — the war and its aftermath sit inside that interval, and the pattern was the state's, not this town's alone: Scottsburg's 1917 grant likewise did not open until 1921, and Syracuse's 1917 grant the same. The library's own facility statement closes the account from its side: "Constructed: Original Carnegie Building 1921 at 124 E. Michigan Street in New Carlisle, Indiana. (Now the New Carlisle Town Hall)." Grant 1917, building 1921: both dates are the record's, and both print. One dispelling belongs in the same article, because the trap is built into the source itself: the same enumeration's row 20 reads "Carlisle — Feb 6, 1915 — $10,000 — Burned down in 1965." That is Carlisle in Sullivan County, a different town two hundred kilometres south, whose Carnegie building burned; it is not this library's grant, its date, its amount, or its fate, and any account that gives New Carlisle a 1915 grant or a 1965 fire is reading the wrong row of the right table.
Principal sources: List of Carnegie libraries in Indiana (164 libraries; New Carlisle row and Carlisle row both read at the table); Lee Lewellen, Indiana's Carnegie Libraries photographic census (New Carlisle caption); the library's own facility statement in its orientation packet (read whole); Indiana Historical Bureau marker text for Scott County's Carnegie Library (the 1917-grant-to-1921-opening pattern at a second town).