Major donations: two deeds in kind, and the honest thinness after them

the ranked table does not exist at this size, and none is faked

This town's great gifts were land, and both of them are county stories told whole in Recreation: in 1966 the Bendix Corporation gave 175 acres — the clubhouse, the tree sign and the ground — to a parks board formed that year, the deed in kind that created the county's park system; in 1978 the South Bend Audubon Society bought forty acres at Spicer Lake from The Nature Conservancy and gave them to the county, the gift that created the preserve. Both stand whole in the Recreation file, with their instruments' dates and their conflicts; this article carries them at pointer size because the donations leg is where a reader looks for them, and duplication is a defect. The library's founding gift — the Carnegie benefaction of 1917 — belongs the same way to the Libraries leg that holds it. After those: the record thins honestly. No nine-figure or eight-figure gift touches this town; no community-foundation endowment is seated here; the era ladder of "largest gifts" that the big cities climb does not exist for a town whose benefactors gave acres and a library. The founding benefactions at their true size — the park lot named for Colfax in 2026, whose giver the record reached does not name — stand inside the one gap this article owns (GAP-NC5-SPE-5; settler the town's dedication record for Colfax Park). The leg closes ranked as the record ranks: two land gifts, one library, and silence.

Sources:

1. The Recreation leg of this build (the Bendix gift of 1966; the Audubon gift of 1978) — pointer, whole there.
2. The Libraries leg of this build (the Carnegie benefaction, 1917) — pointer.
3. The searches run for a major monetary gift seated in New Carlisle, November 2026 — none documented; results as printed.