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1875 – 1886, the carriers in conflict
The town's one named nineteenth-century liquor entry is a man three carriers describe three ways. Polk's Indiana gazetteer for 1880–81 lists for North Liberty "Travis N A, saloon" — in the town entry and again in the volume's classified Saloons list. The 1875 atlas directory lists the same N. A. Travis, settled in the county in 1872, as "Restaurant and Eating House," and the c.1886 patrons list quoted in the Commercial District nomination likewise gives "N. A. Travis (restaurant and eating house)." And Chapman's 1880 town census omits any saloon or liquor dealer from the town's business entirely. Three treatments, one year-cluster, no reconciliation offered by any carrier: whether the saloon and the restaurant were one house under two descriptions or successive trades is not stated, and this section prints all four carriers and chooses none. (The same gazetteer entry, for the record, says "Clear Lake creek furnishes water power for a flour mill" [sic] — the town's stream is Potato Creek; the gazetteer's wording prints as its wording, not adopted.) The trade's later course, from the nomination's Sanborn-based record: a saloon stood among the east-side Main Street businesses in 1909, and the south storefront of 140 North Main "had a saloon that operated from it during the first decades of the 1900s" before its 1929 conversion to a movie storefront; other gazetteer saloons of the 1880s print in the businesses leg (John Braniff, 1882–83; Charles Fink and T. J. Skiles, 1884–85). The last pre-dry directory read, Polk 1916–17, lists no saloon at all — its only drink-adjacent entry is "Ramstead Wm, soft drinks," the Prohibition era's form of the trade arriving early; Indiana itself went dry in 1918, ahead of national Prohibition, a state frame printed at pointer size.