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1830s–1880, as told by Chapman (1880) and Shultz (1952)
The week at the mill. Before the town's 1837 gristmill existed, settlers went to Elkhart to get grain ground, waiting nearly a week for it (Chapman, Liberty chapter) — the chapter's signature hardship anecdote, the story that explains why the 1837 mill mattered. The house built as a church. David Rupel "built his house with large double doors, so as to use it for a house of worship as well as a home" (Shultz, 1952, Brethren history) — Rupel was called to the ministry, and the Pine Creek congregation was organised in 1854 with Rupel and E. Fenson as ministers. The railroad prophecy. Chapman's closing line on the town, p. 723, verbatim: "All the disadvantage that this place meets with is the lack of railroad facilities; but should a railroad be constructed through this place it would become one of the most flourishing towns in the county" — fulfilled in form, if not in superlative, by the two lines of 1893 and 1894. The first election. Chapman tells the township's first election, spring 1837, held at the house of Jas. P. Antrim, who was himself elected Justice of the Peace — record and stock in one telling. The names on the water. Howard holds the township's settler-family name-stock on its lakes: Goose Lake "a little over two miles north of the town," and "Rupel's lake… lying southeast of North Liberty." And this section's negative: no ghost story, buried-treasure tale, or haunted-place telling for the town was found in any carrier searched — the reached stock is settler-practical, not supernatural, and is printed as found.