The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
— Chapman's 1880 history gives the town two saloons and no keeper. In Polk's 1882–83 directory the town carries three saloon listings, one more than Chapman's count of two years earlier — the two counts stand unmerged, as the record gives them: James Quinn, saloon; Perry Thompson, saloon; John Wolfenberger, saloon. In the 1884–85 volume Quinn advertises on page 743 — "Choice Brands Wines, Liquors and Cigars" — Wolfenberger keeps his saloon, and a third room appears in a form the later town would repeat for a century: C. J. Kern, saloon and dry goods, the bar folded into a general store. The first licensed rooms of Walkerton were not palaces; they were counters in stores and a named man's name over a door, on a rail-and-road townsite where the La Porte–Plymouth road and then the railroads fed the trade.
The hotel keepers were keepers too, and their course is the tavern era's longest. J. M. B. Giberson — harness-maker, in town from 1853 — kept the Walkerton Hotel after his army service until 1875, then built the Florence House, "a very fine house," and kept that."Sample Room on the First Floor; Bus to and from All Trains; Livery Connected." A sample room was the hotel's liquor room, where drummers sampled and travelers drank; Walkerton's best-documented nineteenth-century bar is a hotel's first floor. Beside Giberson stands the Empire House, John W. Kirtsinger proprietor, in the 1880 census of the town's business — the second named keeper of the era. The line runs forward in the same form: James S. Reed's "Restaurant and Hotel" at a dollar a day in 1882; the B&O Hotel and Restaurant under Mrs. Carrie Hudson in 1916; the Palm Cafe and Hotel under J. R. McDaniel the same year. The road houses on the La Porte–Plymouth road outside the townsite itself — the township's own tavern stands — are not named in the record reached; they stand in the residue of GAP-W-FOD-4, settled by the Chapman township sketches read whole and the Polk township listings.
M. B.