New Carlisle: A Philadelphia Man Buys Potawatomi Land
Near South Bend, Indiana
The land here originally belonged to the Potawatomi people. Lazarus Bourissa, a Potawatomi man, was granted it under a treaty, and in eighteen thirty-five Richard Risley Carlisle, a Philadelphia man, paid Bourissa two thousand dollars for one hundred sixty acres. He platted a town and named it after himself.
New Carlisle's location mattered. Surveyors had been unable to run a road through the Kankakee Marshes to the south, so the Michigan Road was rerouted through Saint Joseph County, passing directly through the new town. That road brought settlers, merchants, and eventually a rail line. The town incorporated in eighteen sixty-six. Today the New Carlisle Historic District covers twenty-four acres of the original town core and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, one of the better-preserved small-town street grids from Indiana's settlement era.
