The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
BTC-2 DUG · CHAPMAN (1880) AGAINST THE PLAT RECORD IN HOWARD (1907)
Walkerton has two founding stories in its two county histories, and the build prints them as a pair, each at its own strength, because each is evidence about a different thing. The record-grade story is Howard's, worked from the plat books: West Troy, laid out by Elias D. Jones on the southeast of the northeast quarter of section 23, township 35 north, range 1 west, platted December 14, 1854; Walkerton, platted June 20, 1856 by William C. Hannah on the southwest quarter of section 24; Burk's addition to West Troy, April 27, 1860; then the additions that grew the town — Jacob Rupel's three of December 11, 1868, and Dixon W. Place's of September 3, 1887. The settlement story is Chapman's, worked from living memory in 1880: the first settlement of the township by Christian Fulmer in the fall of 1835; the West York post office of 1851; C. W. N. Stephens's first house and first store in 1854, when the site was dense thicket with no roads laid out; and the sentence that will not reconcile — "Walkerton… was laid out in March, 1857, by one Mr. Allen." No Allen stands in Howard's plat record, and no Hannah stands in Chapman's telling. The pair prints unresolved by design: the plats govern the legal founding (1854/1856), the settlement sequence governs the human one (1835/1851/1854), and "Mr. Allen" stands as Chapman's unreconciled name — a surveyor, a railroad agent, a memory's error — with the county recorder's plat books themselves named as the final settler. What neither telling supports is any founding before the taking: the ground was ceded in the Treaty of Tippecanoe of October 26, 1832, the Story of Walkerton section's settled verdict, and every date in both stories falls after it, as it must.
Principal sources: Howard (1907), pp. 316–317 (the plat record); Chapman (1880), p. 733 (the settlement sequence and "Mr. Allen").