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the Prohibition-trade test — the oddity predates Prohibition by a generation
The Prohibition-trade test finds its oddity forty years early: this township's documented answer to the liquor trade was not a speakeasy but a lodge — the Good Templars' Olive Branch Lodge No. Set that against the trade's own paper: Polk's gazetteer roll for 1916–17 names forty-one New Carlisle businesses — hotels, a restaurant, cigar sellers among them — and NO saloon, an absence printed as a finding in the Bars leg and sized here as this section's commerce oddity: in a railroad town on two highways-to-be, the organized, countable, dues-paying institution of drink was the one organized against it. The "Soft Drinks"-form limb of the test — the near-beer and soda-fountain trade as the Gazette-era advertising record would show it — was run at the strength reachable online and carries no item at document strength: no soft-drink room, bottler or advertised substitute trade of this town surfaces in the advertising record reached, and the limb prints as a searched negative, its settler the Gazette advertising runs themselves. The commerce oddity, honestly sized, is a negative space with a lodge roll in the middle of it.
Sources:
- The banked county record of this build (Olive Branch Lodge No. 149, Independent Order of Good Templars, organized 1875; 143 members by 1880; second in the state).
- R. L. Polk & Co., Indiana Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1916–17, the New Carlisle entry read whole (41 names; hotels, a restaurant and cigar sellers; no saloon) — LDS Genealogy transcription, read November 2026.
- The searches run for a "soft drinks"-form trade in the reachable advertising record, November 2026 — negative at the strength stated; settler named in the article.