Before the Branch — the Bookmobile Question, Tested

1953 or 1959 – 1990

Was Lakeville served before its branch opened? The system's bookmobiles ran for decades; no carrier found names Lakeville as a stop, and the bookmobile's own first year is a conflict that prints whole. The conflict first. The system's history page carries the heading "1953 — The Bookmobile — The Library's first Bookmobile served residents who were not served by a branch." A library-history text carried on the system's digital collections states instead: "The library's first bookmobile hit the road in the summer of 1959. It was a twenty-nine foot long, Gerstenslager-bodied Ford chassis that held 2,500 books, a librarian, a driver… The bookmobile made seven stops a week that first year. By 1962, the service grew to include another bookmobile and eighteen stops per week ranging from one end of the county to the other. During the 1970s, the bookmobiles delivered services to schools, correctional facilities, hospitals, and senior centers, averaging over thirty-five stops per week." Neither version is adopted over the other; a reconciliation (an earlier vehicle against the first owned one) is asserted by no carrier read and is not printed. Its settler is the system's own published history — Mary Waterson's The Library at the Bend in the River, named as a source by the history page — with the annual reports of 1953–1959, at Local & Family History. What stands clear of the conflict: the vehicles multiplied, and the third of them, the Readmobile, debuted in 1996 and was decommissioned in the 2000s (the Indiana Memory record of its brochure). The Lakeville question itself was tested directly — bookmobile and Readmobile stops, deposit stations, school-service points, an earlier reading room in town — and the result is a negative at the strength searched: no carrier found names Lakeville, Union Township, Lakeville High School, or LaVille as a stop or station of any of them. The history text's "one end of the county to the other" and its 1970s school service are general statements that do not name this town and are not converted into a Lakeville stop here. The only reading room in the carriers read is the system's own of 1873, on South Bend's Michigan Street. The question's settler, if a definitive stop list survives, is the annual-report and route-schedule record at Local & Family History — the gap banks as G-L6's register.