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The town's names are odd before its facts are: the prairie it overlooks is Terre Coupee — a French name carried in the record in shifting spellings and readings (Terre Coupee, Terre Coupée), attached in turn to a prairie, a vanished business center at Hamilton, a Masonic lodge (Terre Coupee Lodge No. 204, 1856), a Catholic parish at Terre Coupee, and the township's whole eastern ground, while the town itself took none of it. The ground the town stands on came out of the Treaty of 16 October 1826 (Royce Area 133), whose schedule of scholar grants reserved a quarter-section of section 34, located to Lazarus Bourissa in 1829 — and the Bourissa name itself travels through the treaty schedule, the land-office entries and the later record in a spelling chain no two documents render quite alike, the Potawatomi grantee's French name bending under English clerks. The town that rose on his quarter took a third name from a fourth place: New Carlisle, named for Carlisle, Pennsylvania, by Richard R. Carlisle — the founder's surname and the town's name near enough to read as one word twice, with his circus stage name, Risley, layered on top. A French prairie name nobody kept, a grantee's name nobody spelled twice the same way, and a Pennsylvania city transplanted by a man who nearly shared its name: the naming record is the town's first weird fact, and it is entirely documentary.
Sources:
- This build's Land file (the 1826 treaty cession, Royce Area 133; the scholar-grant quarter-section located to Lazarus Bourissa, 1829; the purchase from his children and the plat of 15 August 1835) — banked, instruments named.
- Chapman (1880), Olive Township chapter (Hamilton as the Terre Coupee Prairie business center, 1838; Terre Coupee Lodge No. 204 organized over Borden's store, 24 July 1856). Read first-hand in this build.
- Dana Groves, Images of America: New Carlisle (Arcadia, 2010), p. 7 — the 1835 purchase from Bourissa, as cited in the Risley record.