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ITEMS 2, 3 AND 7 · BUILDERS NAMED WHERE THEY EXIST — NONE EXIST HERE
The leg's romance chapters — the cars constructed here one at a time, the carriage house that crossed over and built an automobile, the secret one-off — were each tested for this ground, and each test returns the same documented answer. Homebuilders (item 2): no car is recorded as built in Walkerton by a local builder — no blacksmith's steam buggy, no machinist's one-off runabout, no named homebuilt in the county histories, directories, or press record as reached; the town's documented machine talent ran to repairs and sales (the garages of the canvass), not construction. The carriage crossover (item 3): the town's carriage and wagon houses are carried whole in Businesses — Cotton's house, Ross's father-to-son course in buggies, carriages, and machinery, Baugher's and Caudle's wagonmaking — and the crossover test was run on their later years: none of them is documented building an automobile, in whole or in part; Ross's crossover, the record's clearest, is commercial — into selling machinery and the motor age's goods — not industrial. The houses that built the horse age's vehicles here sold the motor age's, and built none of them. The one-off (item 7): no secret car, prototype, or single-built special is recorded for any Walkerton firm or builder in the firm or press record as reached — no Bendix SWC hides in this town's past because no firm here had a research shop to hide one in. Three negatives at three distinct searches, printed together because they are one fact in three forms: Walkerton never built an automobile, singly or in series — which the next article states as this section's headline, with the registers named.
Principal sources: Businesses (the carriage and wagon houses whole); directory and trade record for the houses' later years; firm and press record for a one-off, searched November 2026.