The Bourissa ground: the townsite before the town

To 1835

One cabin stood on the townsite in September 1834. Granville Woolman, whose family came to Olive Township in 1834, remembered it in a reminiscence read at the Woman's Club Banquet and printed by Howard: "There was but one cabin and that was located where the Christian church now stands. That and the land belonged to a family by the name of Bourissau, a half-breed Indian." Howard's town chapter states the title course plainly: "The land on which the town was laid out had been obtained from the Indians by one Lazarus Bourissau, a Frenchman who married an Indian wife. It was from the children of Bourissau that the land was purchased by Carlisle." Chapman tells it the same way, in his own spelling: the land "was first owned by Bursaw(l), a Frenchman, whose wife was an Indian; after his death the property descended to his children, and it was from them that it was bought by Mr. Carlisle." The federal record underneath the tradition is dug whole in the land and tribes sections of this build: Lazarus Bourissa — the name as the treaty prints it — held the northeast quarter of section 34 under the schedule of grants annexed to the Treaty of 1826, one of fifty-eight Carey Mission scholars granted a quarter-section each, and the ground's cession and grant history is printed there instrument by instrument. The spellings print as their carriers give them: Bourissau in Howard, Bursaw in Chapman, Bourissa in the treaty and in modern use. The modern summaries call the place before the plat Bourissa Hills (the reference article) or Bourissa Hill (Discover New Carlisle, the town's promotion arm) — both forms print — and the town's own About page adds that "an Indian trading post was established within the current town boundaries (although it was then called Bourissa Hills) in about 1830."