The Branch in the Schoolhouse Years, 1990–2007

December 1990 – 2007

The Lakeville Branch first opened in December 1990, inside Lakeville High School. The system's own history page states the whole of it under its 1990 heading: "This new branch first opened in December at Lakeville High School." That sentence is all the page gives — no day in December, no room or wing, no hours, no word on whether the public entered apart from the school, no first librarian, no collection size — and the arrangement's terms bank as a named gap, their settlers the system's annual reports and board minutes of 1990 and the school corporation's minutes of the same year, at the library's Local & Family History department. What stands around the gap: the branch was still in the school sixteen years later — a South Bend Tribune item of 2006, at the strength of its ProQuest summary, reports from "the Lakeville branch, which is currently in the old high school," with the branch's gardener keeping "two planters inside," and adds: "But Lakeville has plans to build and will have landscaping." The school it sat in was the old high school building at 601 N. Michigan St — high school until 1965, elementary until 1983, and by 1990 the town's retired schoolhouse (the schools leg carries the building whole). The system had housed a branch inside a school before — its first branch opened at River Park School in 1920, on its own history page — a precedent printed at pointer size: it proves a practice existed, nothing about Lakeville's terms.