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1826–1835 · the townsite's first owners of record
The first people named on the townsite's paper are not settlers but scholars. The schedule attached to the Treaty of 1826 (7 Stat. 299) grants quarter-sections in this township to named graduates and pupils of the Carey Mission school: in Township 38 North, Range 1 West, Joseph Bourissa (northwest quarter of Section 35), Mark Bourissa (northwest quarter of Section 26), Jude Bourissa (southwest quarter of Section 23), Achan Bourissa (southeast quarter of Section 27), and Lazarus Bourissa (northeast quarter of Section 34 — the quarter on which the plat of New Carlisle stands). With them stand Peter Moose (northeast quarter of Section 35), Betsey Ash (northwest quarter of Section 33), Susanna Isaacs (northeast quarter of Section 33), and the chief Topenibe (southwest quarter of Section 33). The selections were made in the fall of 1829 by the missionary Johnston Lykins, and the grants could not be conveyed without the consent of the President.
What the grants were for is told two ways, and both print in the land leg's file at length. The federal-record account — the missionary Isaac McCoy's own correspondence, carried in the Wyckoff and McCoy records — is that the selections were designed to be sold, the proceeds to fund the removed mission in Kansas, that McCoy estimated the sales at $13,000, and that "these students probably never saw these lands." The local tradition, printed by Howard and Chapman and fixed in the Woolman reminiscence, is of Lazarus Bourissa as a resident landowner on the townsite, whose children sold the quarter to Carlisle in 1835 after his death. The federal account governs the grant's purpose in this history; Lazarus Bourissa's residence on the quarter is not asserted, because the record that grants him the land does not carry it. What is certain is the course of the paper: the five Bourissa names stand in the treaty schedule of 1826, and nine years later their family's quarter became a town named for an acrobat.
Sources
- Treaty of 1826, schedule of grants, 7 Stat. 299 (banked and read in the land leg's file).
- Granville Woolman reminiscence, in Chapman (1880), Olive Township chapter.