The establishment test — no New Carlisle office on 1 July 1836

1835–1843 · FIRST-HAND NEGATIVE

The town was platted in 1835, and the post office was not there yet. The federal Table of Post Offices in the United States, on the first of July 1836, searched whole for the name, carries exactly one New Carlisle: Clark County, Ohio's. The Indiana office was therefore established after 1 July 1836, in the window between the town's platting and the first appointment the record names — Jeremiah Service, appointed postmaster in 1843 in Historic New Carlisle's telling of the Service house, the same Jeremiah (J. H.) Service whom Chapman gives as born in New York in 1812, the storekeeper-banker of this build's businesses and banks files; the initials, the birth year, and the town agree across the two records, and the appointment is printed at the joint strength of that agreement. The window the evidence leaves is narrow: the town's standard reference entry, citing a postal record, dates the New Carlisle post office's operation from 1837 — consistent with the 1836 table's negative, and printed at that strength. The office's exact establishment date and its first postmaster remain unproven from a postal instrument read first-hand: they are banked as a named gap (GAP-NC3-PO-1), settlers in order the Table of Post Offices of 1851, the Indiana postal-history databases, the Indiana State Library's post-office card file, and the National Archives' Record of Appointment of Postmasters (M841), whose New Carlisle line settles both questions in one read.

Sources:

1. Table of Post Offices in the United States, 1 July 1836 (archive.org, listofpostoffice1836unit): searched whole; the only New Carlisle is Ohio's. Read first-hand.
2. "New Carlisle, Indiana" reference entry: "The New Carlisle post office has been in operation since 1837," citing its postal source — printed at reference strength, bounded by the 1836 test.
3. Historic New Carlisle, Service house history, via January 2018 reprint: Jeremiah Service appointed Postmaster in 1843. Secondary strength, carrier named.
4. Chapman (1880), J. H. Service sketch: the identity frame (b. 1812, New York; store; bank; one term in the Legislature; Justice of the Peace four years).