The 1916–17 census of firms: five listings, two grocers — and the mills gone

1916–17 · POLK'S INDIANA GAZETTEER AND BUSINESS DIRECTORY, PT. 2

Thirty-two years after the first canvass, the gazetteer counts the village again, and the count is five: "OSCEOLA Population, 250. On the L. S. & M. S. and on the C., S. B. & N. I. Electric R. R. in St. Joseph county, 10 miles east of South Bend, the county seat, and 6 from Mishawaka, its banking point. Tel., W. U. Exp., American." The listings, complete: Carroll John, grocer; Crull Bros, general store and farm implements; Crystal Springs Creamery Co; Curtis C M, grocer; Laughlin Charles, hardware. The village of 1916 is a food-and-hardware village: two grocers (Carroll and Curtis — the second a name the township roll has carried since the first settler lists, James Curtis's family, though the record does not state the descent and none is asserted), one general store that also sold the farm implements the township bought (Crull Bros — the store trade and the implement trade in one house, the farm century's characteristic firm), the creamery, and a hardware store (Charles Laughlin) — the trade Plumb's and Eberhart's general stores had once folded into their stock, now standing on its own. Gone from the canvass: both mills, both blacksmiths, the grain dealer, the livestock dealer, the physician, the justice, the carpenters. Some of that is the directory's own thinness — a gazetteer canvass is not a census — and some of it is the age: the automobile was ending the blacksmith's trade everywhere, and the interurban the entry now names (the Chicago, South Bend & Northern Indiana electric line) had joined the steam road as the village's carrier. What the entry states at its own strength is printed; what it omits is printed as omission, not as proof of absence — except where the two canvasses agree with the rest of the record, as they do on the mills.

The banking line has narrowed but not changed: in 1884 the banking towns were "Elkhart or Mishawaka"; in 1916–17 the banking point is "Mishawaka," six miles. The village's money still travelled west to the sister city — and would, on the record tested in the banks article below, keep travelling for the rest of the town's history. Between the two censuses this section's whole named commerce stands: eleven firms, then five, and no third canvass of the village at this form was reached.

Sources:

1. R. L. Polk & Co., Indiana Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1916–17, pt. 2, part 49 (Osceola entry, transcribed whole above), read in the LDS Genealogy transcription mirror, November 2026; transcription caveat as in the closing sources.