Gravel by the townships, and the surfaces after

1860s–2014 · the succession after plank

The surface succession on the founding road runs: cut dirt, corduroy at the holes, plank, gravel — and then a gap in the record where the pavement date should be. Howard's roads chapter carries the gravel era's mechanism as a county peculiarity worth printing whole: "We may note as a peculiarity of our local highway system that the gravel road laws of the state have never been applied to the improvement of the highways of this county. Good road gravel is so abundant in almost every section of the county that the township trustees and road supervisors have had no trouble in graveling the roads by using the ordinary road labor and the township road fund for that purpose." So the Michigan Road through Lakeville was gravelled as a township charge, outside the state's gravel-road system, for the half-century between the plank's removal and the state system's arrival — the road's longest surface, and the one no state record dates. Macadam prints as a reached-record negative: no macadam surface is documented for the Lakeville reach in any carrier reached (the 1846 company of the southern reach proposed "plank or macadamized"; nothing ties macadam to this ground). Hard pavement belongs to the state era — the highway system's general course ran "from dirt to gravel to brick or concrete, and eventually to asphalt," and the 1919 fight the record keeps was over hard-surfacing State Road 1 south from Plymouth against the Michigan Road toward Logansport, SR 1 winning — but no year for the first pavement through Lakeville itself was reached (gap G-RD-6; settlers: the state highway commission's annual reports and map series, 1920–1932, read for the Lakeville reach's surface symbols). The numbered era's later surfaces are field-record facts: the old road between South Bend and Lakeville stood four-lane undivided by 2007 (the surveyor's photographs and captions); the widening era is the same carrier's hedge — "probably in the 1960s and 1970s… US 31 was widened to four divided lanes and rerouted to bypass several towns" — printed as a hedge, at that strength; a 2002 South Bend TribuneSince 27 August 2014 the town's surface is the two-lane SR 931, the freeway article below carrying the change.

Principal sources: Howard (1907), Ch. VI §II §3 (first-hand); Grey, the Michigan Road state-system history and the US 31 surveys (moderate, hedges kept); South Bend Tribune, 2002 (snippet, labelled).