St. Stanislaus Kostka Parish, Terre Coupee — the Catholic parish, founded 1884

1884 – present · 55756 Tulip Road

The Catholic question for this township settles positive, and east of town. Terre Coupee — "land cut off," in French — is the prairie, the vanished stage town of Hamilton, and in time a railroad station east of New Carlisle in Olive Township. Its Catholics were the Polish families of the settlement that began when, Chapman notes, Fred G. Miller imported the first company of "Polanders" into Indiana in 1865, most settling in the township's marsh timber — thirty-five families by 1880. The parish's own history tells what came before a church of their own: Terre Coupee Catholics used St. Hedwig and St. Joseph in South Bend, or St. Mary's in Otis; and between 1870 and 1875 the Rev. Francis X. Szulak, S.J., visited Terre Coupee, celebrating Mass in the woods or in the log cabins of the Lawrence Mackowski, John Gondek, and Delecki families — the parish quotes the account from St. Mary's centennial book — and said Mass on alternate weekends at Rolling Prairie. In 1884 the Rev. Valentine Czyzewski, C.S.C., pastor of St. Hedwig in South Bend, founded the parish and chose its patron, the boy saint Stanislaus Kostka. The cornerstone was dedicated on Sunday, August 31, 1884; the wood-frame church, sixty by thirty feet, rose on land Lawrence and Mary Mackowski donated to Bishop Joseph Dwenger for one dollar (deed of September 12, 1884), on the site that is now the parking lot north of the present church. Fred Miller donated lumber, parishioners hauled and built, the whole cost $1,800, and the church was dedicated on Sunday, October 12, 1884. It served as a school as well.

The parish had no resident pastor until 1888, when the Rev. Wladyslaw Zborowski of the Fort Wayne Diocese was assigned — St. John Cantius at Rolling Prairie was assigned to this mission with him. On March 25, 1889, Zborowski bought an acre and a half from Jacob and Antoine Mackowski for $187.50, built a rectory in 1889, moved in on January 1, 1890, and died of pneumonia that April, aged twenty-nine; Fr. Zubowicz of St. Hedwig's then cared for the parish. The Rev. Alexander Buechler, named pastor May 1, 1901, found the parish grown from thirty to 126 families and built the present church: cornerstone laid Sunday, August 30, 1903, walls up by 1904, brickwork, roof, and finishing in 1906 — a Gothic-style church built much by the parishioners themselves, its altar stained glass in place before dedication. Buechler organized the Men's Sodality (fifty members), the Ladies Rosary Society (forty-five), and the Young Ladies (forty). The old wooden church served as the school until it burned in 1908; in the fall of 1910 the parish bought the No. 5 Public School from Olive Township and moved it onto the old church's foundation, and the parish school sat until 1925. The succession after Buechler (who left in 1908) runs Peter Budnick, Julian Skrzypinski, and Ladislaus Szczukowski at about a year each; Michael Swiatkowski, arrived 1918, who built a rectory and wired the church for electricity; Julian Doktor, 1929 to April 1932; John Wroblewski, appointed 1932 and remaining twenty-five years, who made the rock garden that became the parish Grotto and under whom six stained-glass windows were added in 1947 and four more donated; and Thomas Depa, named in 1956, who seated a trustees' board, bought parking-lot land in 1957, built the parish hall (groundbreaking June 23, 1963; $70,000; 113 by 60 feet; completed spring 1964), and saw the new fiberglass steeple — thirty-seven square feet, four tons — lifted into place on October 11, 1968, before his 1974 assignment to Holy Family Parish.

The modern course runs Thaddeus Kwak; Fr. Gieranowski, who added a daily-Mass chapel seating fifteen, completed in late spring 1980 at $30,000, its altar blessed by Bishop Joseph R. Crowley on September 15, 1982, and who retired in 1981; Derrick Sneyd, installed by Bishop William McManus on July 19, 1981, who took the parish's first comprehensive census, completed the Religious Education Center — 6,000 square feet, nine classrooms — in mid-September 1983, and kept the centennial of 1984; Robert Hammond, from 1988, who air-conditioned the buildings; Gene Kazmierczak, from the summer of 1993, under whom the parish school reopened — announced in 1995, opened September 11, 1995, with fifteen preschool students and Mrs. Jen Sosinski as first teacher; Jan Klimczyk, from July 2002, who commissioned the carved Last Supper now on the altar, brought from Poland; Fr. Paul, from July 2007, under whom the parish grew to nearly 300 families; Robert Garrow, appointed by Bishop Kevin Rhoades in June 2020, in whose time $541,000 was invested in facility improvements; and Brian Carpenter, appointed administrator in July 2024 and pastor in September 2025 — the present pastor as of November 2026, corroborated independently by a National Eucharistic Congress report of Fr. Brian Carpenter making the announcements at the 10 a.m. Mass at St. Stanislaus Kostka, New Carlisle. The parish describes itself, at 55756 Tulip Road, as the "Roman Catholic Church serving Terre Coupee and New Carlisle, Indiana," in the Diocese of Fort Wayne–South Bend — erected as the Diocese of Fort Wayne in 1857, renamed Fort Wayne–South Bend in 1960, the diocese whose Bishop Dwenger took the Mackowskis' deed in 1884. Its bishop as of November 2026 is Kevin C. Rhoades, appointed November 14, 2009, and installed January 13, 2010, who on October 31, 2026, opened the diocese's first synod since 1926 at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, Notre Dame. One indexing caution: the genealogical society's index lists this parish twice, under "New Carlisle" and under "Terre Coupe" — one parish under its postal town and its village name, not two.

Sources

1. St. Stanislaus Kostka Parish, ststansnewcarlisle.org, parish history — the parish's own account, read in full, November 2026.
2. Chapman (1880), Olive Township chapter, p. 766 — the Polish settlement of 1865, first-hand.
3. Diocese of Fort Wayne–South Bend — the diocese course and Bishop Rhoades's synod, diocesan strength.
4. South Bend Area Genealogical Society, church-records index — the double listing noted.