No tannery, no market house: the two firsts that were never here

1880–1917 · Polk's Indiana State Gazetteer, 1880–81, the Lakeville entry read first-hand; the gazetteer rosters

Both tests return negatives at full gazetteer strength — and one of them returns a trap, printed here so it is never sprung. Polk's Indiana State Gazetteer and Business Directory for 1880–81, the first gazetteer of the town's era, prints Lakeville whole: "Union township, St. Joseph county… some 150 inhabitants, 10 miles south of South Bend… two churches — Methodist and Christian — daily stage to South Bend, fare 50c, and Plymouth, fare 75c. Mail daily. C. J. Swezey, postmaster." Its business list runs to some two dozen names — blacksmiths, a flour mill (Clenny and Eldred), saw mills, shoemakers, a saloon, a hotel, a wagonmaker, physicians, a general store, hardware and drugs — and it contains no tanner and no tannery. The trap stands in the adjacent entry, and it is exactly the kind that fills false firsts: the village listed immediately before Lake Valley and Lakeville in the same gazetteer is Laketon, in Wabash County, and Laketon's list carries "Gerlach C, tanner." That tanner is Laketon's, not Lakeville's; any future find of a "tanner" near this town's name in a directory is to be checked against the entry heading before it is believed. The later rosters the banked businesses file read whole — the gazetteers of 1882–83, 1884–85 and 1916–17 among them — carry no tanner or tannery for Lakeville either, and neither Chapman's nor Howard's trade lines name one: across the whole directory era, no tannery ever stands in this town. The market test divides in two, and the division is the answer. A meat market the town certainly had — the same 1880–81 list carries "Brewer John, meat market," a butcher's business among the shops. A market house — the municipal market building of the checklist's meaning, a structure a town builds and lets to stall-holders — stands in no carrier reached: not in the gazetteer lists, not in Chapman's village description, not in Howard, and not in the incorporated town's record as dug; a village of 150, and a town that peaked under 900, on this record never built one. Both items therefore close at their true size: the tannery was tested across four decades of directories and was never here, and the market the record knows is John Brewer's meat market of 1880 — a shop, not a market house.