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1918–1933 · PROHIBITION-ERA LINCOLN TOWNSHIP
Indiana went dry before the nation did, its statewide prohibition law taking effect in April 1918, ahead of the federal amendment's January 1920 start and running to the national repeal of December 1933 — and for those fifteen years the legal map of Walkerton ground changed without its policing map changing at all: the township's stills and blind tigers, if it had them, were the sheriff's and the federal prohibition agents' to raid, and its liquor cases ran to the county's courts like everything else. The ground had the era's raw materials in plain sight — Chapman's 1880 census counts two licensed saloons in a town of fifty businessmen, and the township around it was farm country of corn, orchards and marsh, the standard geography of the still. The county's dry-years record at full depth — the bootlegging economy that supplied South Bend's speakeasies, and the seized-liquor resale scandal in which confiscated liquor in official custody was sold back into the trade, the reselling official named in the county's record — is the county build's to tell whole, and it stands carried in this section's closing article as a named item with its settler, the Tribune's archive for 1918–1933.
For Walkerton and Lincoln Township themselves, the test this build ran is printed with its result: searches of the open press record, the digitized newspaper collections, and the federal prohibition record reached for a still, a speakeasy, a raid, or a liquor prosecution seated in Walkerton or Lincoln Township across the dry years returned nothing seated here. The finds that surface under the town's name belong to other grounds and other Walkertons, and no Walkerton name stands in the federal record reached. The township's dry-years page, at the strength reached, is therefore blank, and it is printed blank rather than furnished with atmosphere: a railroad town between two thirsty cities, ringed by marsh farms, may have run liquor, and the record reached does not say so. The Walkerton Independent's surviving run and the Tribune archive for the dry years, read for the town and township by name, are the settlers named for any stronger statement either way.
Sources: Indiana statewide prohibition, effective April 1918, and the federal era 1920–1933 (statutory frame); C. C. Chapman & Co.