The town Chapman counted, 1880

1880

A large business, although they have no railroad. Chapman's Union Township chapter carries the village whole in one passage, and it is printed whole because it is the town's first complete portrait: "The township contains but one village, — Lakeville. It is a pleasant little village, located about the center of the township, and contains several hundred inhabitants." And of its trade: "Although they have no railroad, a large business is carried on by the merchants. The village contains 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, — all doing well. It has also two churches, with a good school, while three M. D's attend to the afflicted in the town and vicinity." "The people are kind, intelligent and social." The same chapter records the township's first school-house — a log structure built in 1836 on the corner of James Moon's farm, its first school taught in the winter of 1836–'7 by James Roberson of South Bend to about twenty scholars as a subscription school — and the village's Masonic lodge, started in 1867 with ten charter members named, grown by 1880 to "a good society of about 52 members." A saw-mill and a grist-mill were working by 1880; neither history names the townsite's first mill or its builder, and that want stands in the note's gaps. The churches Chapman counts are dug in the religion pass; the one church conflict his chapter and Howard's raise — a first church built in 1843 against one built in 1858, both one mile north of the town — prints whole in this build's register and in the tribes section's companion record.