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Lathrop M. Taylor: A Modest Estate, Well Concealed
The fortune: Taylor (d. 1892), the town's first merchant and Coquillard's partner in the plat, is the rare pioneer whose scholarly biographer priced the ending honestly. Anson, working from Taylor's own ledgers, records that Taylor survived the Panic of 1837 in a stronger position than he entered it, sold his store to his brother in 1847, traded furs independently through the peak years of 1851–1853, and retired in 1856 to manage his estate for the remaining thirty-six years of his life. The scale of the trading years is in his own books as Anson tabulates them: the May 1831 store inventory stood at $1,607.00 of goods, $312.00 cash, and $845.21 in notes, with the season's purchases from suppliers totalling $4,908.26 — a frontier store's working capital, documented to the cent.
Its scale: Of the estate at his death in 1892, Anson's verdict is the whole of the published record: "This was probably composed of some farm real estate and rental properties in South Bend. It was supposed to be modest and appears to have been well distributed and concealed." No dollar total exists in print. His retained land wealth is documented in kind rather than in figures: the tract east of the Michigan Road known as Taylor's Field, used for circuses and fairs in his lifetime, which his children began subdividing the year after his death — the Taylor's Field subdivision of 1893.
Sources:
- Bert Anson, "The Early Years of Lathrop M. Taylor, The Fur Trader," Indiana Magazine of History XLIV (1948) — the career, the May 1831 inventory, the "modest… well distributed and concealed" estate.
- University of Notre Dame, Building South Bend — Taylor's Field: the retained tract and the 1893 subdivision by his children.