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THE INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY · THE THESES · THE AGENCY RECORD
What it is: the learned stock, kept short because it is short: this town's scholarly literature is a thread, not a shelf, and the thread has a name — Schuyler Colfax. Willard H. Smith's "Schuyler Colfax: Whig Editor, 1845–1855," in the Indiana Magazine of History (read in its ScholarWorks PDF; the paper was read at the Indiana History Conference of December 10–11, 1937), carries the town's one scholarly-biography passage: Colfax lived at New Carlisle from 1836 to 1841, clerking in his stepfather's store, and began there the newspaper apprenticeship — local papers first, then articles arranged for Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune — whose surviving specimen, a cipher letter dated from "New Carlisle, Ia. [Ind.], April 9th, 1840," the sibling newspapers leg prints. The same journal carries the county history's contemporary reception, Demarchus C. Brown's 1908 review of Howard. Beside the journal stand the dissertations the state library's guide preserves: John Renkiewicz's The Polish Settlement of St. Joseph County, Indiana, 1855–1935 (Ph.D. thesis, University of Notre Dame, 1967; the state library holds it on microfilm) — the scholarly settler for the story Chapman opens, the Polander colony of 1865 in Olive's marsh timber — and the Esslinger thesis (Notre Dame, 1972) beside it in the guide. A thesis is scholarship at examination strength: supervised, evidenced, and unrevised since; the build names them as the deep-reading shelf for the two stories — the Polish settlement and the county's political rise — that outrun the narrative sources. The agency literature closes the stock: the SARE grant report already cited, a funder's report doing a local history's work by accident, which is a fair description of much of this town's modern record.
Principal sources: Smith, "Schuyler Colfax: Whig Editor, 1845–1855," Indiana Magazine of History (ScholarWorks), read first-hand; Brown's 1908 review of Howard, same journal; Indiana State Library holdings guide (read first-hand) for the theses' records.