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LIB-3 DUG IN PART · THE LIBRARY'S OWN COUNT, THE TRIBUNE'S MIDDLE SEAT
The library has been housed in three buildings across its life, and says so itself; the middle seat is the one the record can describe room by room. The first home of the 1913 collection is not described in the record reached — a room, a storefront, or a school corner; the board minutes are its settler. The second seat is documented at journalism strength: in 2007 the South Bend Tribune, reporting the county's library-consolidation debates, described Walkerton's library as sitting in a circa-1964, 4,500-square-foot strip-mall facility that had begun life as a clothing store — "It was never meant to be a library" — run on an annual budget of a little more than $100,000, with St. Joseph County Public Library director Don Napoli quoted on the economics of small libraries. The third seat is the present one, 406 Adams Street, the gift-built library whose land and building story the new-building article below carries. The course prints as the library itself frames it — three buildings — with the middle building's description resting on the Tribune's 2007 account and the first building's description standing as a named gap with the board minutes and the Independent's early runs as its settlers.
Principal sources: the library's own history (three buildings, in its words); South Bend Tribune, 2007 library-consolidation reporting (via the Mishawaka-Berrien Regional Library / ProQuest record); Indiana State Library Directory 2026 (present seat, 406 Adams Street).