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1830–1851
The town grew up on the Michigan Road, located through this ground in 1830. Chapman records that the first regularly located road in the county was made in 1830 under Judge Polk of Logansport, by order of the State — the Michigan road, run from Madison on the Ohio River to the mouth of Trail Creek — and that west of South Bend it left the county "on section 34, township 38 north, of range 1 west, where since has been located the town of New Carlisle," bent through South Bend to avoid the Kankakee marsh. The town's first building trade was the road's. "The hotel in New Carlisle was built in 1836 by Richard Cranmer who occupied it for a time and then sold it to Joseph Ivens," whose house gained "a great reputation as one of the best houses on the 'stage line.'" Schuyler Colfax's mother removed to New Carlisle with her family in 1836; Mr. Mathews opened a store, the young Colfax serving as clerk, and Mrs. Mathews organized a Sunday school in her own house shortly after arrival. The post office has been in operation since 1837. Mrs. R. J. Pidge, arriving as a bride on 31 January 1847, remembered the town whole: "There was a hotel, a dry goods store, a post office (kept in a blacksmith shop), and perhaps some other small shops. The hotel was kept by Joseph Ivens. There was no church or school house in the town then, no railroad. The only public conveyances then were the large four-horse stage-coaches." The township's first center, though, was not New Carlisle: about 1836 Samuel Garwood sold a prairie tract to Jonathan Hubbard, who laid out the town of Terre Coupee, where a man named Hamilton built a hotel and the place gradually took the hotel's name. "At that time Hamilton was the great business center for this part of St. Joseph county," Chapman writes. "Since the railroad has been built through the county and made a station at New Carlisle, Hamilton has run down." A post office named Terre Coupee stood near Hamilton; the plat, the hotel, and the station decided between the two towns, and Hamilton survives in the record as the township's first center and its first eclipse.