The Parochial Strand: St. Stanislaus Kostka, Terre Coupee

THE PARISH SCHOOL'S WHOLE COURSE · 1884 TO THE PRESENT STATE AS REACHED · THE TOWN'S PARISH SITUATION AS EVIDENCE

New Carlisle's Catholic school story is a rural parish's story, and the town's parish situation is itself the first evidence: the town has no Catholic parish church of its own. Its serving parish is St. Stanislaus Kostka at Terre Coupee — 55756 Tulip Road, in the township north of town, with a New Carlisle postal address — founded in 1884 by Father Valentine Czyzewski, pastor of St. Hedwig in South Bend, for the Polish farm families Chapman had watched clearing Olive Township's marsh timber in 1880. The parish's own history gives the school's whole course. The first church, a 60-by-30-foot wood-frame building whose cornerstone was dedicated August 31, 1884 on land donated by Lawrence and Mary Mackowski and dedicated October 12, 1884, doubled as the schoolhouse: "The church was used as a school for the children of the parish." A resident pastor came in 1888, Father Wladyslaw Zborowski, with St. John Cantius of Rolling Prairie also assigned to the mission.

The school then did something that ties the parochial strand directly into the township's public record. "The old wooden church served as a school until it was destroyed by fire in 1908. In the fall of 1910, the parish bought the No. 5 Public School from Olive Township and moved it to the foundation of the old church. The No. 5 Building was roughly a quarter mile north of the present church on Tulip Road. The church school was in session until 1925." A township district schoolhouse, bought from the township and moved onto a church foundation, carried the parish school from 1910 to 1925 — the one-room era and the parish era in a single building. The parish built for religious education again two generations later: a 6,000-square-foot, nine-classroom Religious Education center, ground broken April 24, 1983 and completed that September.

The school then returned. "In the late winter of 1994, Fr. Gene [Kazmierczak], along with the parish council, made a commitment to open a school at St. Stan's after a hiatus of nearly 100 years." Mrs. Jen Sosinski was appointed the new St. Stanislaus Kostka School's first teacher, with Mrs. Joy Lach as teaching assistant, and "on September 11, 1995 the school officially opened with 15 students in the pre-school program." The parish history's two statements are printed here whole and unmerged, as they stand in tension: the same account dates the church school's closing to 1925 — seventy years before the reopening, not nearly a hundred. The parish itself is alive and served — Father Brian Carpenter, administrator from July 2024, became pastor in September 2025 — but whether the reopened St. Stanislaus Kostka School still operates in November 2026, and at what grades beyond its preschool opening, was not verified in the record reached; the parish sources are heavily shadowed in search by the larger St. Stanislaus Kostka School of Michigan City, a different parish's school, which is named here only to be kept apart. The New Carlisle school's present state is carried as a named gap, with the parish office and the diocesan schools office named as settlers.

The town's other early parish kept no school at all in the record reached. St. Mary's Episcopal Church, New Carlisle, began as a mission in 1885, stood among the charter congregations of the Diocese of Michigan City (now Northern Indiana) in 1898, dwindled to a few services in 1906–1907, and closed; in 1915 its building, windows, and fixtures were moved by rail and incorporated into the Church of the Good Shepherd, East Chicago. Its parish register, 1885–1904, survives in the diocesan archives; no school attached to it appears in any record read. Boundary parochial schools — the Michigan City Catholic schools among them (Marquette, Queen of All Saints, Notre Dame Catholic School, and Michigan City's own St. Stanislaus Kostka), La Lumiere at La Porte, and St. Paul Lutheran School — reach this section only as names on a real-estate listing of schools said to serve the Rolling Prairie area, which is not evidence that New Carlisle children attend them; they are printed at that strength, as unverified boundary candidates, with their settler named in the gaps.

Sources:

1. St. Stanislaus Kostka Parish, Terre Coupee, parish history (ststansnewcarlisle.org) — read in full; the founding, the church-as-school, the No. 5 purchase of 1910, the 1925 closing, the 1983 center, and the 1995 reopening, quoted.
2. Today's Catholic, May 24, 2026 — Father Brian Carpenter as pastor of St. Stanislaus Kostka, New Carlisle.
3. Episcopal Diocese of Northern Indiana Archives (USC Scalar) — St. Mary's Episcopal, New Carlisle: mission 1885, closure, the 1915 removal, the register.