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ITEM 10 · THE CONSOLIDATION CENTURY PASSED THIS GROUND BY — A DOCUMENTED NEGATIVE
The modern era of the trade is the group — the single-point store absorbed into a regional or national chain of rooftops — and the test for this ground is short because the precondition fails: the town's houses were never the kind of property groups buy. No Walkerton dealership is documented as acquired by, merged into, or reborn as a dealer group at any date: the franchised record ends with Williams Supply's open course (above), and the present Roosevelt Road row — Celebrity, Midwest — stands in the current directory as independent used-car houses under their own names, not as group rooftops. The group era's local effect arrived inverted: the groups consolidated the county's trade in the cities, and the gravity that emptied this town's new-car trade (Businesses's modern course) is the group century's local signature. The item closes DUG as a tested negative: Walkerton contributes no house to the group rolls, and the era prints here as the force that acted on the town rather than a chapter the town acted in — the distinction this section's modern form exists to catch.
Principal sources: Businesses (the modern course; the present row); the current directory (the row's independence), November 2026.