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Howard 1907 · the rest tested
One sentence in the county history gives the derivation — and the fuller telling that circulates belongs to Minnesota. Howard states it outright in his Lakeville section: "It receives its name from a number of small lakes south of the town, the chief of which is Riddle's lake." That is the whole of the record's naming account — a derivation with no namer, no naming act and no date, from the county history of 1907. Geyer's narrative opens the ground with "a few small lakes" but never states a naming act: her sequence runs from "Earl Town" to "It later was named Lakeville", with no reason given for the name. The town's reference article carries no etymology, and the standard Indiana place-name carrier reached returned no Lakeville entry. What the wider search surfaces, printed here as the conflation hazard it is, is the other Lakeville's fuller story: "Lakeville, as you might guess, gets its name from its lakes… here in Dakota County, Minnesota", and that county's 1882 tradition of a townsite "called… Lakeville on account of its proximity to a pretty little sheet of water". Neither carrier is about Indiana, and neither is imported. Indiana's name-origin therefore prints at exactly Howard's strength: named from the small lakes south of the town, Riddle's chief among them — who named it, and when, no carrier reached says.