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ITEMS 4–5 · THE MAKER TEST AT REGISTER STRENGTH; THE NAMES THAT DO NOT VERIFY
The production test is this section's foundation: was any marque of automobile manufactured in Walkerton, at any date, in any number — and the marque registers, encyclopedias, and the town's own canvasses answer together: no. No motor-buggy factory, no costliest-car venture, no unit-power-plant works, and no marque of any description is recorded as founded, seated, or producing in Walkerton; the registers of American marques carry no Walkerton entry, and the town's industrial record — glass, food, composites, doors — contains no vehicle works in any canvass from 1882 to the present. The one production-adjacent name in the file is a sales point (Williams Supply's Studebaker point, 1951), printed at its exact strength in Businesses. The false-marque test runs with it, as ordered: no automobile was ever marketed under this town's name — there is no "Walkerton" car to dispel, as there is a car called "South Bend" in the sister build's telling — and the false attributions that do circulate for this ground are geographic, not mechanical: the Ontario Walkerton's dealership record (Leslie Motors), excluded by name in Businesses's gaps article, and any Indiana/Ontario confusion of the same class. A marque attribution to Walkerton, Indiana, surfacing in any register or lore after this build stands against this dated negative: the maker test was run in November 2026, at register strength, and Walkerton built no automobiles.
Principal sources: marque registers and encyclopedias checked for a Walkerton maker, November 2026; the directory canvasses 1882–present; Businesses's gaps article (the Ontario exclusion).