The New Carlisle Gazette: the town's paper, as a source about itself

FOUNDED FEBRUARY 6, 1880 · DIRECTORY RUNS 1880–189? (LCCN SN87055951) AND 1938–19?? (LCCN SN87056643)

What it is: the town's paper of record for its first era, and — unusually — a paper whose founding this build can watch two county histories describe. Chapman, writing in the year of the event, gives the founding at contemporary strength: the Gazette "established as an independent newspaper by G. H. Alward of South Bend and G. M. Fountain of Mishawaka; first number issued Feb. 6, 1880," a six-column folio enlarged to seven columns at its eleventh number; and on August 20, 1880 Fountain bought out Alward, made the paper Republican, and enlarged it to eight columns. Howard, a generation later, agrees on the date and the facts and reverses only the billing — "established Feb. 6, 1880 by George M. Fountain and George H. Alward" — then carries the story forward where Chapman could not: after six months Fountain bought out his partner and continued the paper as a Republican journal until his election as clerk of the St. Joseph circuit court, when E. L. Maudlin took charge. Two witnesses, one event, the agreement exact and the discrepancy trivial and printed: that is what corroboration looks like, and the build's press articles lean on it. As evidence the paper then works at directory strength: the U.S. Newspaper Directory record (carried in the Chronicling America data) gives a first Gazette run of 1880 to "189?" under LCCN SN87055951 (OCLC 15560304), a second Gazette run beginning 1938 under LCCN SN87056643 (OCLC 16826360), and a third Gazette record, SN99063502, appearing in the directory extracts — the directory's own untidiness preserved here rather than smoothed. The runs' ends are open questions, and one of them is a genuine conflict: the directory closes the first run in the 1890s, while Howard's history reprints recollections written for the New Carlisle Gazette on November 16, 1906 — the paper alive, on the county history's own evidence, a decade after the directory lets it die. Both print (the sibling newspapers leg carries the conflict as GAP-NC-NWS-2); the settlers are the paper's own surviving file and John W. Miller's Indiana Newspaper Bibliography (1982), whose locational record of original and microfilm copies is the print authority for where the runs physically are. A paper is the worst witness to its own biography; this build takes the Gazette's business facts from its competitors, its catalog record, and the directory — and its news from its pages, where pages survive.

Principal sources: Chapman (1880), the Gazette section of the Olive Township chapter (p. 770), read first-hand; Howard (1907), New Carlisle section, read first-hand; U.S. Newspaper Directory records as carried in the Chronicling America data (through RoadsideThoughts' directory extracts, read first-hand, and the sibling newspapers leg's directory work).