Dairy: the Schlosser Brothers creamery, bought 1895, operating in 1916

1895 – at least 1916

North Liberty's dairy record has a name, a buyer, and a manager. The Plymouth Weekly Republican of 30 November 1911 (read first-hand) profiles Schlosser Brothers of Plymouth, "the largest manufacturers of butter in Indiana," and dates the firm's expansion in a single sentence: "The first extension of the business came with the purchase of creameries at Wanatah in 1890; Hanna, in 1892; and North Liberty, 1895; these plants being consolidated with the Plymouth plant later." The firm ran on the gathered-cream plan, its routes and stations collecting cream across northern Indiana — forty to sixty farmers to a route, on the firm's biographical record, the same wagons and later trucks carrying farmers' eggs back to market; at its scale it made over 13,000,000 of Indiana's roughly 64,000,000 pounds of creamery butter a year. (The same biography records that Philip Schlosser was drowned at North Liberty in January 1901 — a fact about the firm, printed at that carrier's strength.) And the North Liberty plant was still a working creamery a generation after its purchase: Polk's 1916–17 gazetteer lists "Schlosser Bros, J G Holderman mgr, creamery" in the town's business directory. The two carriers stand in a printed tension — the 1911 article's "consolidated with the Plymouth plant later" against the 1916–17 directory's operating listing under a named manager — and the consolidation's date and its effect on the North Liberty plant are unresolved between them; the conflict prints whole in this build's register. At county strength, milk from cows sold $4,818,000 in 2017, ranking the county 33rd of Indiana's 77 reporting counties; township herd counts and any milk route to South Bend specifically — as distinct from the Plymouth gathered-cream system proven above — were not documented and stand as a named gap, their settlers the state dairy reports and the 1920 and 1940 census county tables.