Correspondents: a future Vice President writes from New Carlisle, and a pioneer writes for the Gazette

1836–1843 · 1906 · the journalists at the size the record carries

New Carlisle produced no editor of record's record — but it housed, for five boyhood years, a boy who became one of Indiana's great editors: Schuyler Colfax came to New Carlisle in 1836, aged thirteen, with his mother and his stepfather George W. Matthews, and lived here until the family moved to South Bend in 1841 — Willard H. Smith's study of Colfax as a Whig editor, in the Indiana Magazine of History, is the record, and it places the start of the journalism here: interest in newspapers began early, and at sixteen — in 1839, from this town — Colfax began writing for local papers; two years later he was arranging to send articles to Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune. The surviving specimen of the New Carlisle years is characteristic of the man he became: a cipher letter dated "New Carlisle, Ia. [Ind.], April 9th, 1840," signed SCHUYLER COLFAX, challenging Alexander's Weekly Messenger in Philadelphia to solve his substitution ciphers — a seventeen-year-old correspondent performing for a metropolitan paper from a village with, as yet, no paper of its own. Colfax's editorship belongs to South Bend — he bought the South Bend Free Press with Albert W. West and renamed it the St. Joseph Valley Register in 1845 — and it is carried here at New Carlisle size only: the town's contribution to Indiana journalism was the correspondent's desk it gave a teenager, four decades before it had a press of its own. The town's other named contributor stands at the other end of the press's life: Hugh V. Compton, whose Terre Coupee recollections the Gazette printed in 1906, carried in the archive article above. No crusade, feud, or celebrated editorship is recorded for any New Carlisle paper in the record reached; the journalists print at this size because this is the size the record carries.

Sources:

1. Smith, "Schuyler Colfax: Whig Editor, 1845–1855," Indiana Magazine of History (paper read at the Indiana History Conference, 10–11 December 1937), via IU ScholarWorks — the family's settlement at New Carlisle in 1836, the five years there, the move to South Bend in 1841, writing for local papers from age sixteen, the Greeley arrangement, and the later Register editorship.
2. Colfax's cipher letter, "New Carlisle, Ia., April 9th, 1840," as reprinted and studied in Brigham, "Edgar Allan Poe's Contributions to Alexander's Weekly Messenger" (1943), via the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore.