The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1849–1889 · Chapman; the 1875 Atlas; the 1889 manufacturers' directory
The floor's test asks for the fall at the rapids, quantified; on this ground the measurement is zero, and printing that measurement is the article. Lakeville stands on the divide country at the county's south tier, draining south in ditches and small water; no carrier reached — Chapman, Howard, the 1875 Atlas, the Polk directories, or the 1889 Directory of Indiana Manufacturers — names a milldam, a millrace, a fall, or a waterpower site in Union Township. Every mill the record gives is steam: Earl and Gilmore's steam saw mill of 1849, the township's first; the Slough brothers' steam saw mill in Section 19; Coquillard's mill worked from 1854; Shidler's saw mills after it. The Mishawaka pattern — a river fall of two feet nine inches harnessed by a race — belongs to a river town eight miles north and is not imported. The reason is geographic and prints as the finding: a townsite on a drainage divide has no fall to measure, so its industrial revolution skipped the water age entirely and began, in 1849, with steam. That is the power source, measured as the record allows: waterpower, none; the race-and-dam system, none built; the settler who could overturn it would have to name a dam in the General Land Office or atlas record, and none is named there. This item is the record's true size.