The unwinding, 1973–2011: the closure wave as one series

1973–2011 · assembly synthesis of the banked trains, banks and schools files, at their own strengths

Read separately, they are a railroad item, a school item and a bank item; read together, they are one event with four dates — the forty years in which Lakeville lost, one by one, the institutions that had made it a place on other people's maps. The series opens on the rails. The Vandalia's successor line through town — Penn Central's South Bend Branch, the Nutwood-to-Culver segment that was Lakeville's — was abandoned in 1973 and its track removed in 1974, at the line history's compilation strength, with no ICC or STB docket found in the settler named for it (Railroads, lk-trn-abandonment). The second date is the school's: Lakeville High School at 601 North Michigan, the township's first, had already yielded its classes to the new LaVille building in 1965 and served on as an elementary school — until 1983, in the National Register nomination's words, when it was "closed altogether" (Schools, lk-sch-lakeville-high); the town's own schoolhouse went dark the same decade the trains stopped running both ways. The third date returns to the rails: the Wabash line through Lakeville, by then Norfolk Southern's Gary East Line, was abandoned in 1989 under Docket AB-290(34) — the docketed, documented end the Vandalia never got — leaving the town with no railroad at all (Railroads, lk-trn-abandonment). The fourth date is the bank's: the office at 222 South Michigan Street, Lakeville's bank in branch form since 1982 under five successive names — St. Joseph Bank and Trust, the Society names, KeyBank from 1996 — ends its federal deposit series at June 2011, its deposits shrunk from $17,328 thousand at the June 1994 survey to $7,477 thousand at the last (Banks, lk-bnk-branch-years). The series has a preface that prints because it sharpens the rest: the one line that was never Lakeville's to lose, the interurban proposed toward Plymouth, was never built to the town at all (Railroads, lk-trn-interurban). Nothing in the reached record assigns a single cause, and this synthesis assigns none — the carriers give a branch-line railroad economy ending, a consolidated-school geography settling, and a branch-banking era consolidating, each on its own clock. But the checklist's instinct is borne out by the dates themselves: between 1973 and 2011 the town's train, its schoolhouse and its bank all closed, and the Lakeville that the Story of Lakeville section's modern frame describes — a town remaking itself around a highway interchange — is the town on the far side of that series.