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1849–1889 · settlement origins and the 1889 directory, read for works labour
No works on this ground ever drew labour from outside the township's own settlement stream, and the record's numbers, such as they are, say so by their scale. The mills of 1889 were six small firms; the saw and grist work of a farm township ran on hands counted in ones and twos per firm, drawn from the same households that farmed — the settlement origins in the people file, Ohio and eastern migration by family, with the township's French and Black settlements arriving as farm communities, not as mill labour. No carrier reached prints a recruitment, a boarding of hands, a foreign-born works colony, or a population movement aimed at a Lakeville employer; the county's industrial immigration stories belong to South Bend's and Mishawaka's factories and are not imported. Two classes of works labour do stand in the record at name strength: the mill men themselves — Shidler building and running mills across three decades, the Slough brothers buying 240 acres and milling on it — proprietor-labour, farmer-industrialists rather than a workforce; and the haulage labour of the lumber trade, Fogle's year of wagon work to South Bend. The residue is stated as the audit left it: a numbered works-labour account would need the census manuscripts read against the 1889 directory firm by firm, and that reading — settler named, current — has not been done. This item closes mixed: the character of the labour is settled, its count is not.