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Chas. C. Chapman & Co., Chicago, 1880 · 986 pages — the Olive Township chapter (pp. 764–787) read first-hand
What it is: the first full history of the county, and the base layer under this build's nineteenth century. The volume's own contents place the Olive Township chapter at page 764, and the pass read the chapter whole — the narrative at pages 764–770 and the biographical sketches that follow. Chapman is a compiler working within living memory of the settlement he describes, and for this ground that memory is close: the township, he records, was occupied by whites only from 1830; it was surveyed that year by William and Noah Brock; the Carey Mission, a mile and a quarter below Niles at Big Springs, had held two hundred Indian pupils, each to receive 160 acres selected from the ten-mile strip — which is why so much of Olive's land was selected for the mission's pupils before it was ever a farmer's purchase. He gives the township's naming for the wife of Charles Vail, the first death (Jonathan Garwood), the first church (built at Hamilton in 1838, by Methodists), and Hamilton's whole arc — the early business center of the township, eclipsed when the railroad made its station at New Carlisle instead. Terre Coupee Prairie he measures at four miles and more across, three to four thousand acres, at eighty to one hundred and twenty dollars the acre. For the town itself: New Carlisle "beautifully situated on a hill," most of the village on section 34, founded by Richard R. Carlisle, "a sportsman and traveler of early day, who finally died in Philadelphia," on land first owned by a Frenchman whose wife was an Indian and bought from that man's children. He carries the township's later texture too — Fred G. Miller's importation of the first company of Polanders into Indiana in 1865, thirty-five families settled in Olive's marsh timber; John Reynolds, "said to be the richest man in St. Joseph county"; the water-works of 1879, seven thousand dollars of seven-percent bonds sold at par to a Vermont savings bank; Terre Coupee Lodge No. 204, organized July 24, 1856 — and, in a section of its own, the founding of the town's newspaper, treated in Part Three below.
What he is good for, and bad for: good for the first fifty years at connected-account strength — settlement, churches, schools, lodges, the town's institutions as a connected story rather than a list — and for the business texture of 1880, the year of publication. Bad for names at machine-carrier strength, and this build's copy discipline states it plainly: the copy read was the LDSGenealogy transcription, an artificial-intelligence OCR of the printed book (the very copy scanned is the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Collection's, bookplate and barcode on the part title), and its name readings wobble — the Frenchman's name on the town site comes through as "Bursaw(?)," the query mark standing in the transcription itself. The rule this build follows is the rule its sibling builds state: cite the book, name the carrier, and treat every name that matters as owed a page-image check. One more strength, easily missed: Chapman corrects his predecessors in the open. "The first couple married in this township, according to the Atlas of the county, were Charles Vail and Olive Stanton, but this is not correct" — a compiler who prints his disagreement with the county atlas is a compiler whose agreements mean more. The volume carries a general press chapter (Chapter XIV) and a "Dark Deeds" chapter (Chapter XVI) beside the township chapters, and a biographical index to the 1880 history stands on the state library's shelf as a companion.
Principal sources: Chapman (1880), Olive Township chapter, pp. 764–787, read first-hand through the LDSGenealogy AI-OCR transcription (carrier named; the copy transcribed is ACPL's Genealogy Collection copy); the volume's contents for the chapter's placement.