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The Navarre Cabin test, run for this county
The floor's test asks for the oldest possession — the founding object a county's museum holds — and for St. Joseph County the answer stands at boundary size, in South Bend. The object class is the Navarre Cabin: the cabin of Pierre Navarre, the county's first permanent settler of the European record, dating to about 1820, a decade before the county itself. It is the county's standing oldest-building and founding-object exhibit, and in 2024 it was relocated to the History Museum's campus on West Washington Street for education and preservation — the museum's own visitor record states the move and its purpose. The museum that holds it describes a collection of over half a million objects gathered since 1867. What this section could not reach is a museum-published superlative — a single object named by the History Museum itself as its oldest possession, of the kind a collections record would settle. The residue is therefore stated: the founding-object answer prints at the cabin's strength — oldest surviving settler structure, held by the county's museum — while the collections-record question, the oldest accessioned object as the museum itself ranks it, waits on the History Museum collections record, named here as settler, current. No object of any age is held by a museum on Lakeville ground, there being no museum on Lakeville ground; the test's local answer is the boundary one, printed as such.