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item 1 — the home market as the first ledger, whole at its figure
The township's first export trade was grain to the continent, and its ledger survives at one great figure: in 1879 George H. Service bought and shipped a million bushels of wheat out of New Carlisle — prairie wheat gathered by wagon to the town's elevators and sent east by rail to the lake and seaboard markets. That figure is the home-market ledger the floor asks for in its surviving form: the wagon trade that fed it stands in Chapman's course (the prairie holders' hundreds of acres, Massey's fifty-bushel acres), the elevators that held it in the businesses leg, and the railroad that carried it in the transportation leg. Behind the one figure, the year-by-year shipping course — bushels by season, markets by name — stands in the Gazette's shipping record, named here as the course's settler; the leg prints the trade whole at the strength of its one audited number rather than inflating a season of anecdotes into a ledger. Foreign shipment in the grain era is the same trade one step further on: wheat shipped east entered the export stream at the lakes and the seaboard, under other men's names at other ports — this town's share of the foreign trade was real and uncounted, and it is printed as exactly that.
Sources:
- This build's Businesses and Notable People (Service's million bushels, 1879; the prairie holders and Massey in Chapman).
- Chapman (1880), Olive Township chapter — the wagon-and-elevator course behind the figure.