The place-name: the lakes south of the town

All readings printed

No carrier names a namer or a naming act; the record offers lakes, and does not choose among them. Howard's town section: the town "receives its name from a number of small lakes south of the town, the chief of which is Riddle's lake." Howard's township section: the town "was built up near the banks of Riddle's lake, just south of the town. Pleasant lake and numerous other pretty little lakes are in the vicinity." Chapman: "Just south of Lakeville are several small lakes, the largest of which are called Pleasant and Riddle's lakes. The ground around them is quite miry and mucky. One of them is said to be quite deep." A modern survey of the Michigan Road prints the pair jointly: "Lakeville was named after the two small lakes that stand near it." The readings stand together, unmerged: Riddle's chief in one telling, Pleasant and Riddle's jointly largest in another, the two lakes in a third — and no single-lake origin is stated by any carrier. What can be settled is the lakes' survival: neither is gone. Both stand on the modern record south of the town as Pleasant Lake and Riddles Lake — the possessive worn down to a plural in the modern spelling, a change no carrier reached explains — on the U.S. Geological Survey's Lakeville quadrangle (2013) and in the Indiana Department of Natural Resources' lake survey series, the Riddles Lake depth map of July 2019 giving it 77 acres, with a channel joining it to Pleasant Lake in the fishing record.