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1880
The town's dress trade enters the record in a single line of Chapman's 1880 census of its businesses: "one millinery store." The Chapman list (spine and businesses legs) counts the whole town in one breath — dry-goods establishments, boot and shoe stores, a drug and hardware store, a grocery — and among them the millinery store, the one business in 1880 North Liberty whose whole stock was women's dress and hats. The milliner herself is not named in the passages reached; her name stands as a named gap, its settler the 1880 census manuscript for Liberty Township and the Chapman volume's own biographical section read whole. The census-of-manufactures test required by this section — an official count naming a clothing manufacture here — returns a negative: no garment factory, boot factory or clothing works for this town appears in the manufacturing record reached, and the signature-product article therefore has nothing to carry. Dress in this town was sold, not made, from the first count forward.