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The Library of Congress panoramic maps collection, searched for this ground
South Bend has its Ruger view of 1866; Lakeville has none, and the negative is now printed in the maps treatment where the floor requires it. The test is the national one: the Library of Congress panoramic maps collection — the great census of American bird's-eye views — searched for Lakeville and for Union Township returns no view of this ground, of any maker, in any year. No local carrier reached names one either: no lithographed prospect of the town hangs in the record the way such views hang in the records of larger places, and the town's pictorial fame in this build runs the other way — a street-level postcard view of Michigan Street, famous precisely as a photograph of a width and a crossing, not an artist's aerial fiction. The economic logic prints with the negative: the bird's-eye trade sold views of places with subscribers enough to pay for the lithographer, and a village of a few hundred, unrailed until 1884 and small thereafter, was below the trade's threshold in its great decades. The settler is the audit's own and the search is the one it prescribed; the negative stands at that strength, and this item is the record's true size. Should a view surface — in a county collection, an attic, a dealer's catalogue — it will be a discovery, and this article is written so that discovery can be recognised against it.