One street, four names — and the Death Crossing

1830–1928

Michigan Street through New Carlisle is one street under four names: the Michigan Road, located in 1830; the Lincoln Highway from 1913; State Road 2 in the first state numbering; and U.S. 20. The Register nomination states the continuity exactly: Michigan Street "has been from its platting in 1835 a part of an improved thoroughfare, first the Michigan Road, later the Lincoln Highway and, finally, US 20." Two widths for the same street print whole: the plat of 1835 shows Michigan street at one hundred feet; the nomination measures the street at forty-five feet — the dedication's width and the present street, each at its own strength. That the numbered highway carried the Lincoln Highway's original route through this town is answered, not assumed: the Indiana Lincoln Highway Association's turn-by-turn guide for the 1913 route runs it here — at St. Joseph County mile 25.6, "The Lincoln Highway curves to the left under a railroad viaduct and enters New Carlisle. The route is called Michigan St through New Carlisle because it runs with the Michigan Road Historic Byway (from 1829) through this area" — past the Jeremiah Service House of 1860, "perhaps better known today as the Old Republic," at mile 25.9, and out Michigan Street and U.S. 20 to County Line Road at mile 27.0. The Association states the 1913 Indiana route as running "along US 20 and IN 2 to Valparaiso": this length carried the Lincoln Highway from 1913 until the realignment, which the record dates two ways — the U.S. Route 20 account says the Lincoln Highway was rerouted to U.S. 30 in 1926, while the Association's guide works to a 1928 date. Both print. The old route's signature place was its east-edge crossing, where the road ran straight across four tracks at grade — two New York Central, one Chicago, South Bend & Northern Indiana, and one Chicago South Shore & South Bend. The Lincoln Highway marker standing before Town Hall at 124 East Michigan Street calls it, in the words the marker carries, "the most dangerous railroad crossing on the Lincoln Highway, and with the largest number of victims to its credit of any crossing on the coast-to-coast route." The cure swung the road onto a curve passing under two railroad overpasses east of town, a changed stretch measuring 1.09 miles; the realignment's completion is also dated two ways — 1925 in the survey account drawn from the Association's map, "until 1926" in the same survey's narrative — and both print. U.S. 20 today runs four-lane through Hudson Lake and New Carlisle and west into La Porte County; State Road 2's presence here belongs to the 1910s–20s numbering, its present west end meeting U.S. 20 at Rolling Prairie.