The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1822–1835 · before the first congregation
The townsite's first religious fact is a mission school across the Michigan line. The Baptist missionary Isaac McCoy established the Carey Mission among the Potawatomi on the St. Joseph River near present Niles, Michigan, in December 1822; its school opened 27 January 1823 with thirty pupils, and the mission — named for the English Baptist missionary William Carey — was abandoned after the Indian Removal Act of 1830, McCoy having removed in 1829 and the school closing about 1831–32. Chapman, writing the Olive Township chapter in 1880, remembered that "the whites established the 'Carey Mission' 1¼ miles below Niles, at the 'Big Springs,'" that it "had at one time 200 Indian pupils," and that "by a law of the Government, each pupil was to have 160 acres of land selected from the ten-mile strip" — so that "much of the land in Olive Township was selected for these pupils." One of those pupils' families held the future townsite itself: the land of New Carlisle was first owned, Chapman says, by "Bursaw(?), a Frenchman, whose wife was an Indian; after his death the property descended to his children, and it was from them that it was bought by Mr. Carlisle." Modern sources give the name as Lazarus Bourissa, "a Potawatamie graduate of the Carey Mission who had been granted this section of land by the treaty that moved most of the Potawatamie to the west"; Howard in 1907 spells the name "Bourissan" and "Bourissau" and tells the same descent — on his death, his children sold the land to Richard Carlisle, who platted the town in 1835 and gave it his name. The three spellings of the founder's name — Chapman's "Bursaw(?)," Howard's "Bourissan/Bourissau," and the modern "Bourissa" — print here unmerged, as each source gives them.
The corridor that carried the preaching was the old Sauk Trail — the Chicago Road — running across Terre Coupee Prairie through the hamlet of Terre Coupee, also called Hamilton for Hamilton's tavern, where the stages changed horses. Howard's Olive Township section prints the Haines family reminiscence of the Black Hawk War summer of 1832: fleeing their home in what is now Hudson Township, LaPorte County, the family "started for the Carey Mission near Niles," and stopped at Samuel Garwood's at Terre Coupee only because the people there were building a fort. The mission, by then closing, was still the region's named place of refuge. Olive Township itself was organized in 1830 per Chapman — the frame date this section is given — but Howard's township section dates the formation of Olive, with Penn and Portage, to an order of May 6, 1832, and Judge Lucius Hubbard's paper, printed by Howard, says the commissioners "reorganized the township and laid it out under its present name" in 1832; the two dates print whole. The name is agreed on all hands: Olive (Stanton) Vail, wife of Charles Vail, a settler of 1830 — "This being the best and most beautiful township in St. Joseph county, it shall be named for your girl wife," Judge Egbert is remembered to have said at the Vails' supper table in 1831.
Sources
- Chapman, History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), Olive Township chapter, pp. 764–765 — read first-hand in the ldsgenealogy.com part transcription (AI-OCR carrier).
- Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), vol. 1, Olive Township section, pp. 295–300, and New Carlisle town entry, pp. 312–313 — same carrier.
- Kansas Historical Society, Isaac McCoy papers — Carey Mission founding, school opening, and abandonment.
- Wikipedia, "New Carlisle, Indiana" — the Bourissa Hills name and the Carey Mission grant, at encyclopedia strength.