The story
Welcome to Lakeville
Lakeville grew up as a resting place on the Michigan Road, the great highway from the Ohio River to Lake Michigan, and took its name from the little lakes just south of town. It lived through a plank-road boom and bust, then prospered when two railroads came, and it was incorporated in 1902.
The ground around Lakeville was slow to fill. Chapman (1880) says many early travelers passing through Union Township thought it “an almost worthless tract” because of its marshes, and that people settled first along the Michigan Road and on the higher land to the west. Elijah Lineback brought his family in the spring of 1833 and built a cabin on section 35; John Henderson, the Rector brothers and Hubbard Henderson followed in 1833 and 1834. The township’s first election, in April 1836, was held at Earl’s tavern, where thirty votes were cast.
Howard (1907) explains that Lakeville began as “merely a place of rest and refreshment” for travelers on the Michigan Road, which carried settlers, land speculators and merchants hauling goods up from the Wabash. The town lies on both sides of the road, on sections 34 and 35, and is named for the small lakes south of it the chief of them Riddle’s Lake. The oldest recorded plat is Coquillard’s addition of August 18, 1857, made by the son, nephew and widow of Alexis Coquillard, one of the founders of South Bend; the original lots, lettered A to F, were not recorded until December 23, 1859.
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Lakeville grew slowly. When the Michigan Road between South Bend and Plymouth was planked, new life came to the village and several additions were laid out, but the planks wore out and were taken up and the toll houses removed. Chapman found the village without a railroad in 1880, yet with two stores, a drug and hardware store, a hotel, shoe shops, three or four blacksmiths, a sawmill and a gristmill, two churches and a school. Chapman says the Methodist church in the village was begun in 1857 and finished in 1858, and that a Masonic lodge was started in 1867.
Then the Vandalia railroad came through, and later the Wabash, with connections to Chicago and the East. Additions were platted by John Henderson, Michael Hupp, Stephen A. Ulery and Sarah E. Rush, the town had 350 people by 1900, and the county board incorporated it on July 7, 1902. The brick Lakeville High School, designed by Hubert Miller and built in 1931, served until 1983 and is now a community center on the National Register. The 2020 census counted 879 people.