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ITEMS 3 AND 9 · THE SELL-ONLINE-AND-STAY FIRM, AND THE CRASH'S LEDGER — NEITHER STANDS HERE
The leg's centerpiece in the big cities is the homegrown winner — the local firm that sold online and stayed, told founding-to-present at business depth; Walkerton's record holds no such firm, and the other side of the ledger is equally blank. The town's modern business course stands whole in Businesses, and it is a manufacturing course: Polygon Company (composites, founded 1949), the Masonite and Modern Door operations, Ultra, Ross Engineering — firms that make things in buildings, sell through the trade's channels, and appear in the record as plants, employers, and investments (Polygon's August 2026 capacity investment among them), never as online sellers whose founding model was the internet. No Walkerton firm is documented in the Secretary of State's records as reached, the Tribune's business pages, or the firms' own published histories as a dot-com: founded to sell online, grown on the web, and still here. The winner's chair is empty, and the leg prints it empty rather than promoting a manufacturer into it. The bust is the same shape: no Walkerton firm is documented as a dot-com casualty — no startup that raised on the boom and died in 2000–02, no local name in an acquisition-at-the-top story, no dissolution in the crash's record with an internet business behind it. The town's documented business deaths are older and heavier (the banks in 1930, the cut glass in 1919, in their own legs). The patterns themselves are the sister cities' whole — the Tire Rack pattern is South Bend's, the Sweetwater pattern Fort Wayne's — printed here at boundary size so this section's shapes are visible and its local answers are honestly none.
Principal sources: Businesses (the modern course, whole); Indiana Secretary of State corporation records and the Tribune business pages at search strength, November 2026; the sister-city patterns at boundary size only.