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Green Book editions sampled; banked hotel course as the chronology
No Lakeville lodging appears in the travellers' guides sampled — and the chronology prints beside the fact, because the town's lodging trade had ended before the guides' era began, and the fact must not be made to carry more than it holds. The measurement: the Negro Motorist Green Book, in the editions sampled, lists no Lakeville hotel, motel, tourist home or rooming house; its Indiana listings run to the cities. The chronology: Lakeville's directory hotel line ends with the 1880s keepers, its Forrest Hotel stands proprietor-less in the record, and by the 1916–17 bench no hotel is listed at all — the town's commercial lodging had effectively closed a generation before the Green Book's first edition of 1936. The two facts together measure this: a Black traveller on the Michigan Road in the guide era found, in Lakeville, no listed welcome and also no listed house of any kind to be turned from — the exclusion of this town was the exclusion of absence, its roadside trade already gone to the motor age's larger stops. That is a measurement of the record, stated as such; it neither acquits nor accuses a desk that no carrier reached describes. The residue: the full Green Book edition run at the New York Public Library's digital collection, and the Tribune's accommodations reporting — named in the Black-history cluster's accounting as shared settlers, and named again here for this section.