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November 2026 · tractor registers and the county histories, named below; Chapman (1880); Howard; Polk 1880–81, 1884–85, 1916–17
Was a farm tractor ever built in this town? No — and the test now leads the leg, with the registers searched named, as the checklist requires. The registers and records searched for a Lakeville maker: the national tractor-maker registers and marque lists carried in the trade record; the county histories (Chapman, 1880; Howard) read for a works of any kind; and the directory run the banked build swept first-hand (Polk 1880–81, 1884–85, 1916–17), whose whole implement entry for the town is two general-store lines — John Hupp's "Millinery and Fancy Goods and Agricultural Implements" (1884–85) and Moon's Cash Store's "genl store and farm implts" (1916–17) — goods sold, never goods made (this history lk-civ-machines; Dealerships lk-dlr-horse-trades). No tractor maker, works, or prototype stands in any of them. The boundary prints in the same breath, as the checklist directs: the famous works of this county built plows and, in the next county's telling, trucks — the Oliver Chilled Plow course is South Bend's, its tractor line another city's after the 1929 merger took the name to Charles City, Iowa, and a same-brand tractor of the post-merger years is an Iowa tractor, never a St. Joseph County one. Lakeville has no local-works limb of that boundary to blur in the first place: it built neither plows nor trucks, and the only motor-age manufacture on its ground is a racing tire (the businesses file's whole course). The maker test's answer is therefore a documented negative at register strength, and it heads the leg.