The eras read off the numbers

1880–2020

Read as rates between named censuses — arithmetic on the series above, labeled as arithmetic — the town's 140 years fall into five eras, and the causes the record can carry are printed with them and no further. First, the long plateau of the railroad age, 1880–1920: from 530 to 609, a gain of 14.9 percent across forty years, containing two outright declines — 607 to 597 between 1890 and 1900 (−1.6 percent), 612 to 609 between 1910 and 1920 (−0.5 percent). The record's account of those years needs no invention: a farm-trade village on one railroad and one state road, its first bank absorbed into the county's course, its college come and gone, holding its population the way a hundred such villages held theirs. Second, the slow rise, 1920–1940: 609 to 747, +22.7 percent, the Lincoln Highway's decades, when the road's traffic was the town's second economy. Third, the near-doubling, 1940–1960: 747 to 1,376, +84.2 percent, with the single decade 1950–1960 alone at +40.0 percent (983 to 1,376) — the postwar building generation, the town filling its plat and its first additions as the South Bend industrial country suburbanized westward; the record names the era's instruments (the school corporation consolidated in its wake, the 1968 high school built for its children) but this section prints the movement itself at the numbers' strength and assigns no single cause the record does not. Fourth, the second plateau, 1960–2000: 1,376 to 1,505, +9.4 percent in forty years, the town essentially full inside its lines while growth went to the township's roads and the county's east. Fifth, the present era in two steps: the 2010 step, taken whole in the next article, and 2010–2020 at +1.6 percent (1,861 to 1,891) — near stillness in the count, in the very decade the township's eastern ground began its industrial remaking, a count that closed on 1 April 2020 before the first of the Story of New Carlisle section's announcements (April 2023 for the battery plant, April 2024 for the data centers) could move a single household. The next census, in 2030, is the first that can register the remaking in people; this section's series ends, deliberately, on the last count that precedes it.

Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau, decennial censuses — the series of the preceding article; all rates computed from it.
2. This build's The Story of New Carlisle and Schools — the postwar consolidation and building record, and the 2023–2026 announcements that postdate the last count.