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1837 – into the twentieth century
Daniel Antrim, who laid out the town, also opened its first store — the founding of the place and the founding of its trade are one act. The businesses leg carries the succession whole: the first store, from 1837, passing Antrim to Reynolds to Richardson to Harvey across thirty years, while the Antrim family's own course is the people leg's. The industrial founding follows a generation later and is a family founding of the same kind: the Cole brothers' planing mill of 1866, burned in 1871 and reincorporated in 1873 as the North Liberty Manufacturing Company — the resurrection after the fire being this town's nearest approach to a turnaround story, executed by its founders rather than by receivers. Isaac R. Cole stands in the people leg's register as the works' named principal. No brother-by-brother division of the Cole founding survives in the record reached; it prints as a named gap, its settler the 1873 incorporation record at the Indiana State Archives. A second corporation, the Home Manufacturing Company, is attested in the businesses leg by its officers alone — a founding whose product the record does not state, carried there and here at exactly that strength.