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c. 1905 attested; the earlier record tested negative
For a horse-era town, the livery is strangely invisible in the directories — and fully visible in the biographies. No livery stable is listed under that trade in Polk's 1880–81, 1882–83, or 1884–85 editions, or in the 1875 atlas directory's business columns — all read whole — and the district record's only livery is the c.1905 concrete-block livery at the northwest corner of Center and Main, standing with the Hotel Grant and gone by 1917, on the Sanborn-derived record. But the trade has a keeper, and this build's people leg carries him whole: Lewis S. Aukerman (born 24 June 1850, Darke County, Ohio; Howard's 1907 biographies, read in the deep pass) worked plastering, livery, confectionery, and horse buying and selling, traded his stable about 1898 for sixty acres in Union Township and a Knox drug store, farmed two years, then "took up his abode in North Liberty," and on 19 March 1906 "became possessor of a livery stable in Knox valued at $7,000, conducting it in addition to his livery business in North Liberty" — the North Liberty stable at fifteen horses and sixteen vehicles, the Knox stable at twenty-six horses and thirty vehicles. His son Oba was associated in the North Liberty livery (a carpenter and joiner by trade); his son Elzy ran the Knox end, Starke County ground, printed here at pointer size. Whether Aukerman's North Liberty stable is the c.1905 concrete-block livery of the district record is stated by no carrier reached; both stand, unmerged. The directory absence thus resolves as the artifact it appeared to be — the directories missed a going two-town livery business entirely — and the standing gap narrows to the trade's earlier course: no keeper is named for the town's livery before Aukerman's arrival about 1900, and that residue stands on Chapman and Howard at page-image strength and the 1909 Sanborn sheet read directly.