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two dated episodes, each with its document
In 1836 a thirteen-year-old clerked in a store in this village; in 1869 he was Vice President of the United States: Schuyler Colfax came west in 1836 with his mother and his stepfather George Matthews, who kept a store — which also served as the village post office — in New Carlisle, and the boy clerked there and read everything the store's newspapers and books put in his hands until the family removed to South Bend in 1841. The clerkship is documented at biography strength several times over — Willard H. Smith's study in the Indiana Magazine of History ("the year 1836 found the Matthews family… settled at New Carlisle… young Schuyler Colfax spent the next five years clerking in his step-father's store"), the 1868 campaign life of Colfax, and the Britannica-derived biographical record. The town kept the connection in stone and grass: the Schuyler Colfax Chapter of the DAR erected the Hamilton Methodist tablet in 1965, and in June 2026 the town dedicated Colfax Park at Cherry and Front streets. The second oddity is rougher and stands in Chapman: in the draft years of the Civil War, a man named Woods who resisted the draft was ducked in a pump trough by his neighbors — the township's conscription enforced, once, by improvised immersion, recorded by the county history as a fact of the township's war. A future Vice President shelved goods here at thirteen; a draftee was baptized against his will in a trough. Both print because both carry paper.
Sources:
- Willard H. Smith, "Schuyler Colfax: Whig Editor, 1845–1855," Indiana Magazine of History (the 1836 removal to New Carlisle; five years clerking in the stepfather's store) — read in the journal's online edition, November 2026.
- Edward Winslow Martin, The Life and Public Services of Schuyler Colfax (1868), ch. I (clerk in a store in the village of New Carlisle until seventeen).
- South Bend Tribune, 28 June 2026 (Colfax Park dedicated June 2026, Cherry and Front streets); Historical Marker Database (the DAR Colfax Chapter's Hamilton Methodist tablet, 1965).