The townsite's firsts, as the works state them — tested

G-SP-1 · the three works searched whole

No first house, no first store, no first townsite mill is stated by any of the three works — and the one first-mill sentence that exists is a township sentence. The search was express: Chapman read whole, Howard's Lakeville section read whole and his first volume searched in full, the Atlas's Union text and directory read whole. For the townsite, none of the three states a first house, a first store or a first mill. The nearest the record comes is functional, not ordinal: Howard's "place of rest and refreshment" — Earl's tavern stand of 1836, the first dwelling the texts place at the site, which Howard does not call a first house; and Chapman's 1880 census of the village — "two good country stores, a drug and hardware store, a hotel, a couple of shoe-shops and three or four blacksmith shops, a saw-mill and grist-mill" — with no firsts attached. The single first-mill statement in any of the works belongs to the township, and prints with its class on it, exactly as the Atlas's Union references carry it: "the first saw mill was built by Earl & Gilmore, in 1849, run by steam" — in a run of township firsts beside the 1836 election, Henderson's justice-ship and postmastership, the split-log school-house on Moon's farm, and the first Methodist church a mile north of Lakeville. Neither Chapman nor Howard repeats the statement; "Gilmore" appears in neither history in connection with Earl or Lakeville, and whether the mill stood on the townsite the Atlas does not say — the identity of Gilmore and the mill's site stand as named gaps's note. The near-firsts keep their own classes: Newton Jackson "operated one of the first saw mills in the county" at Lakeville in the early 1850s (Howard, Vol. 2) — a county-class claim, later than 1849; and Adam W. Shidler built Coquillard's Mill in 1854 and ran it some ten years, three miles south of town in Howard's second volume — a named township mill, not a first. The gap this closes stands closed at exactly this strength: the works' silence on townsite firsts is now a searched silence.