The town as others saw it: Hoganson's Heartland

2019 · The Heartland: An American History

Walkerton's largest cultural fact may be a book: Kristin L. Hoganson's The Heartland: An American History (Penguin, 2019) takes this town as its emblematic heartland place — its LaFeber grocery, its railroad grid, its grain and its general store read as evidence that the heartland was never isolated, always woven into the world's networks. The town's own published history survives, for now, inside her quotation of it (the Story of Walkerton section leg carries the naming conflict and the parked state of the town's history page), and the account has already propagated: Foster & Rotter's Turning to Asia carries Walkerton's portrait onward into the LaFeber literature. A town of two thousand is the named setting of a national argument about what the Midwest is — that is a cultural fact of the first order, and it is the closing line of this section: Walkerton is not only a place that keeps its own record; it is a place the country's letters use to think with.

Sources:

1. Kristin L. Hoganson, The Heartland: An American History (Penguin, 2019) — Walkerton as the emblematic town; the LaFeber store at pp. 106–107; the town's published history as she quotes it.
2. Foster & Rotter, "Turning to Asia: The Clash," ch. 7 of the LaFeber volume (Southern Methodist University) — the Walkerton portrait carried onward (the naming telling; Stephens' store; the grid).
3. The Story of Walkerton section leg of this build (the town history's parked state; the naming conflict, GAP-W-NAME-1).