Industrial buildings as architecture: the mill seats and the Ash Road creamery, at survey size

BUILT FABRIC ONLY · THE FIRMS' HISTORIES LIVE IN BUSINESSES.HTML AND ARE NOT RETOLD

The mill seats. This ground's one nineteenth-century industry was milling on one dam's fall of Baugo Creek water. As fabric, the record reached carries the seat, not a surviving mill building: the mill seat at the creek, the dam and race geography that the 1837 plat's mill-race system already assumes, and the gazetteer course in which, between Polk's canvasses of 1884–85 and 1916–17, “the mills vanish and the creamery appears.” No standing mill building, mill reuse, or mill ruin on this ground is claimed by the survey, parcel or press record reached, and none is printed here as standing. The mill buildings therefore enter the demolition-and-loss side of this section's ledger (closing article): a seat that outlived its buildings, told at that size.

The creamery plant. Two firms, one name, printed apart in Businesses and kept apart as fabric. The historic Crystal Springs Creamery — George E. Moon's butter company, in the record by 1907, the township's one named food manufacturer of the gazetteer age — has no plant description, plant photograph or plant survival statement in the record reached; its building is a named gap, settler: the county survey file and the Tribune / Enterprise record for the Moon creamery plant. The modern Crystal Springs Creamery stands at 60020 Ash Road — a five-digit address, township ground outside the town limits on the township's east edge near the Elkhart County line — where the Martin family, from Nappanee, began its own milking operation in 1996 at the corner of Ash and Jackson roads (Businesses, banked). As fabric it is a working modern dairy plant on a farm address, not a surveyed historic building, and it is printed at exactly that size: a standing, working plant of 1996 origin, with no historic-fabric claim made for it.

Sources:

1. Businesses, banked (mill seat and dam; Polk 1884–85 and 1916–17 canvasses; Crystal Springs Creamery — Moon, by 1907; Martin family, 60020 Ash Road, from 1996, Ash and Jackson roads).
2. Neighborhoods, banked (1837 plat mill-race system). County survey / SHAARD named as settler for the Moon plant's fabric.