Architecture & the Built City

The 1931 high school is the town's one nationally recognised piece of architecture. Lakeville High School, 601 N. Michigan St: two-storey brick with limestone trim behind a brick-and-stone parapet, "simple Collegiate Gothic details" — Late Gothic Revival / Collegiate Gothic — architect Hubert Miller of Elkhart (blueprints 4 August 1930), built 1931 on an eight-acre parcel bought from George & Elizabeth Holland on 28 May 1930 for $3,618.45, listed on the National Register 29 August 1991 (ref. 91001166; criteria A and C). The nomination's verdict stands in its own terms: "the most intact consolidated high school in St. Joseph County." Four auditorium/gymnasium windows had been bricked in by 1990, disclosed in the nomination and listed with the building. The commercial row prints at street strength: Michigan Street is the Michigan Road on a 100-foot right-of-way — the width is the street's defining architectural fact and the reason the 1911 postcard view shows so wide a street — with Chapman's 1880 inventory whole in the Story of Lakeville section file; no building-by-building identification of the postcard view was reached, and the frontage survey is a named gap (settler: the county survey/SHAARD rows and the 1875 plat read against present frontage). The bank building, 222 S. Michigan St, is documented as the town's bank office from 2 April 1956 to the last deposit-series year, 2011 — and its present use was not reached in any carrier: a named gap (settler: the parcel record and dated street imagery), the blank printed rather than a tenant guessed. The water towers print as the town's vertical landmark in two generations — 1965 and 2026, sixty-one years apart, their structural particulars unreached. The Huggart cabin stands as the township's most important vernacular finding: the Hardy Manuel cabin still standsmoved from its original location (the Bureau's marker review) — the file prints the move, not a false in-situ claim. The SHAARD town query could not be run; gap G-SP-7 stands with its settler made precise (the DNR SHAARD public search for Lakeville and Union Township, read against the 1985 county summary). No church in the township is Register-listed in any carrier reached.