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1836 · the founding stand whole
The leg's named-stands test returns one stand for this town, and it is the town's origin.William L. Earl took out a licence for a tavern at the present site of Lakeville, having bought a forty-acre tract of Jacob Rector — one of the Rector settlers of 1833 — for the purpose. The township's first election was held at Earl's tavern in April 1836, thirty votes polled (Chapman). The stand predates the plat by two decades; the town's own plan narrative remembers the place's first name as "Earl Town," at narrative strength, credited to the town's historian. Howard's roads chapter names no roadside stand, tavern or hostelry on the Michigan Road in Union Township anywhere in its roads or railroads sections — Earl's stands in his town material, not his roads material — and no second Union Township stand on the road was named by any carrier reached: the test prints negative at reached-record strength, with its settlers named in the note (Chapman's whole text, gap G-RD-1; the Commissioners' order books, where the licence's own entry stands). The village Chapman counted in 1880 contains "a hotel" — unnamed in his portrait, its keeper line carried in the businesses build at directory strength (Shirk, then Cordary, then Deed, hotel-and-livery) — a village inn of the railroad age's eve, not a second road stand of the stage era, and not merged with Earl's.
Principal sources: Howard (1907), hotel narrative and Ch. VI §II (first-hand); Chapman (1880), Union Township chapter (banked, first-hand in LK-1).