The first press: the New Carlisle Gazette of 1880, and the end the record contradicts

1880 – END NOT ESTABLISHED · the town's first newspaper in the directory record; founder a named gap

New Carlisle's press begins, on the record reached, in 1880: the New Carlisle Gazette is the earliest paper the directory seats in the town — forty-five years after the plat, in a village the state gazetteer of 1884–85 describes as an enterprising place of 1,000 inhabitants on the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railway, fourteen miles west of South Bend. That gazetteer's business list carries the paper in a single line — "New Carlisle Gazette (weekly)" — the first press whole at the strength the record carries: a weekly, seated in the town, in print by 1884. Who founded it, who printed it, and what its politics were are not in the record reached: no masthead of the 1880 Gazette was reached, no Rowell or Ayer entry naming its editor was found, and the founder-printer and the paper's politics stand in the gaps register with their settlers rather than in this article as guesses. The paper's end prints as a conflict, whole and unmerged. The directory record closes the run at "189?" — an unknown year in the 1890s. But Timothy E. Howard's History of St. Joseph County (1907), in its Terre Coupee prairie chapter, reprints the recollections of Hugh V. Compton under Howard's own footnote: "As written by him for the New Carlisle Gazette, November 16, 1906." A Gazette was therefore receiving and printing contributions at New Carlisle in November 1906, at least seven years past the directory's uncertain end. The two records do not reconcile on what was reached — the run may have continued past its catalogued end, or the title may have been revived between the 1890s and 1906 — and this section prints both, dates the paper's documented life 1880 to at least 16 November 1906, and names the cessation an open gap. What is certain is the shape: by the time Polk's gazetteer next lists the town's paper, in 1916–17, the paper it names is not a Gazette at all.

Sources:

1. United States Newspaper Directory record via Chronicling America, at directory-listing strength (LOC item page denied, HTTP 403, not retried): New Carlisle Gazette, 1880–189?, LCCN SN87055951, OCLC 15560304.
2. Polk's Indiana State Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1884–85 — the New Carlisle entry (population, railway, "New Carlisle Gazette (weekly)"), at transcription strength.
3. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907) — the Compton recollections and Howard's footnote dating them to the New Carlisle Gazette, 16 November 1906, at transcription strength.