A place of rest on the great highway

1830s–1850s

Lakeville began as a station, not a farm. Howard's town section is plain about the origin: "Originally this was merely a place of rest and refreshment for the accommodation of travelers, merchants and others doing business along the great highway leading through the state from the Ohio river to Lake Michigan. After the opening of the Michigan road and before the coming of the railroads, immigration and commerce for northern Indiana sought this north and south highway from Logansport to Michigan City" — the immigrant, the speculator and the merchant moving "on foot, on horseback, by the lumbering stage coach or in the weighty Pennsylvania wagons," and "on this thoroughfare Lakeville was a modest station." The stand the record names is Earl's tavern: at the September term of 1836 William L. Earl took out a license for a tavern at the present site of Lakeville, having bought a forty-acre tract of Jacob Rector — one of the Rector settlers of 1833 — for the purpose (Howard, hotel narrative). The township's first election was held at Earl's tavern in April 1836, with thirty votes polled (Chapman). The town's own modern plan narrative remembers the place's first name as "Earl Town," for William Earl; that telling stands at narrative strength, credited in the plan to the town's historian, and prints here as such. No first house or first store for the townsite is named in either county history — for a town that began as a tavern stand on a highway, the record's silence is itself the shape of the founding, and the want stands as a named gap in this build's note rather than a filled-in beat.