Richard Carlisle, the founder — and Professor Risley

1814–1874 · proprietor of the plat, 1835

The man who laid out New Carlisle in 1835 signed the town's founding document "Richard R. Carlisle, Proprietor" — and the record has never agreed on the rest of his name. Howard's history prints him as Richard R. Carlisle. Chapman's history prints him as Richard P. Carlisle. Modern accounts name him in full as Richard Risley Carlisle, and identify the proprietor with one of the most celebrated American performers of the nineteenth century: "Professor Risley," the acrobat and gymnast who created the Risley act. Howard, who knew the local tradition at first hand, describes the founder as "a sportsman and a traveler" who "spent his last days in Philadelphia." The identification prints here as the modern accounts give it, with the three forms of the name standing unmerged, because the town's own paper record carries only the initial.

The career the modern accounts document is this. Richard Risley Carlisle was born in New Jersey in 1814 — Burlington County in the standard biography, Salem in the circus historians' anthology. Before the circus he had been, in one review's summary of Frederik L. Schodt's biography, "a bounty hunter, real estate investor, postmaster, and failed merchant" — the real-estate investor being the man who bought the Bourissa children's quarter-section on Terre Coupee Prairie in 1835 and staked a town on the Chicago Road. He first appears on a circus bill in 1841, performing with two apprentices as the "Polish Brothers," and by November of that year had introduced the act that still bears his name: lying on his back and juggling children with his feet, tossing them into the air to land on his upturned soles. The Risley act is one of only two circus acts named for a real person, and the Guinness Book of World Records credits Carlisle as its first performer. His troupe toured Europe to great success — Paris, Brussels, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Milan, Rome — and performed before Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle. In 1864 he reached Yokohama as the first Western professional acrobat in Japan; in 1867 he brought one of the first Japanese performing troupes to America and Europe. He died 25 May 1874 and is buried at Mount Moriah Cemetery in Philadelphia — the Philadelphia ending Howard's local tradition remembered. The town he founded at twenty-one kept the first of his surnames; the world kept the second.

Sources

1. Plat of New Carlisle, dedicated 15 August 1835, signed "Richard R.
2. Howard (1907), vol. 1, New Carlisle and Olive Township sections — "Richard R. Carlisle"; "a sportsman and a traveler"; last days in Philadelphia.
3. Chapman (1880) — "Richard P. Carlisle," as printed there; the conflict stands unmerged.
4. "Richard Risley Carlisle," Wikipedia, and the American Circus Anthology entry (circushistory.org), for the career, the act, the tours, and the death at Philadelphia, 25 May 1874; Frederik L. Schodt, Professor Risley and the Imperial Japanese Troupe (2012), as reviewed by the Japan Society and in CHOICE.