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dwellings in the district show a strong Queen Anne influence. <br /> Styles of the twentieth century are well-represented, demonstrating indirectly the continuing <br /> health of the town through the 1920s. While some have been altered to such an extreme that <br /> their integrity has been lost, within the five residential blocks are several dwellings strongly <br /> influenced by the Prairie style, which one could speculate may have been in part owing to the <br /> proximity of Frank Lloyd Wright's shining example on West Washington Street in South Bend, <br /> only sixteen miles away. The Craftsman influence appears most strongly on the town library, <br /> but also on some houses, such as 120 South Filbert. There are several American Four Squares, <br /> more a shape than a style, perhaps, and a handful of bungalows are scattered throughout the <br /> district. <br /> As a trading center for the surrounding agricultural community in Olive Township and parts of <br /> adjacent Hudson Township in LaPorte County,New Carlisle maintained a moderate prosperity <br /> in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which is reflected both in many of the residences <br /> and in the commercial buildings in the New Carlisle Historic District. The district's collection <br /> is remarkably intact overall, compared to towns that were once of similar size and development. <br /> Rolling Prairie, only about five miles to west, has lost most of its former commercial district. <br /> Lydick, some ten miles to the east along the railroad and the South Shore tracks, although once <br /> of nearly comparable size, is virtually gone. Perhaps the community closest in comparison <br /> might be Argos, about fifty miles to the southeast in Marshall County, in which a commercial <br /> and a residential historic district have been identified. It, too, was on the Michigan Road, but, <br /> 40 platted in the 1850s, its fortunes rose and fell with the later Nickel Plate Railroad, and thus its <br /> heyday was much shorter than New Carlisle's. New Carlisle may be nearly unique in its <br /> continuity, which is reflected in the broad range and high percentage of survival of its historic <br /> buildings. <br /> EXCERPTED FROM NATIONAL REGISTER NOMINATION <br /> 0 <br />