Specialty ground — the onion trade whole, the cucumber economy, and the mint test

1903–1916 AND THE TESTS · MUCK CROPS AT RECORD STRENGTH

The drained ground's cash crop of record is the onion, and Walkerton in 1916 was an onion-shipping point with four buyers on the ground. Polk's entry names them: Daniel Beal, onion buyer; Nels Erickson, onion buyer; George Stouffer, onion buyer; and Piowaty M & Son of Chicago, onion buyers and storage, Ora Jackson their local man — a Chicago house keeping storage at the Walkerton rail junction, which is the trade's whole structure in one line: the township's muck grew the onions, the junction stored and shipped them, and Chicago bought them. The buyers stand in the directory without acreage, and no township onion acreage is printed here, because none was found in the record read (GAP-W6-12, with the agricultural census's county onion figures and the town paper as settlers). Beside the onions stands the cucumber economy, the Farms side of the Businesses file's pickle article: Atwood Brothers' pickle and relish works, established 1903, and the H. J. Heinz Company's salting station (1916) both drew on the same drained ground's cucumber crop, the salting station being the crop's first processing — cucumbers brined at the station for shipment to a packing house. Two cash crops, one ground: that is the specialty record the sources carry.

Mint is tested for this ground, and the test is negative. The Kankakee valley's mint record is real and near: Starke County, the next county south, stood in 1919 as by its county historian's timeline "the Third Largest Mint Producing County in the World," and St. Joseph County's own peppermint ground of record is Penn Township's — Howard's Jerry R. Woodward, with 300 acres devoted to peppermint and his own distilling, on his farm east of Mishawaka. Neither record touches Lincoln Township. No source read for this section — not Chapman's farm roll, not Howard's sketches, not the three gazetteer canvasses, not the town paper's items reached — names mint, peppermint or a still on Lincoln Township ground, and no mint is printed for Walkerton. The crop's county and regional presence stands at the boundary strength just given; a Lincoln acreage would have to come from the agricultural schedules or the Independent's farm columns, and it stands as a gap (GAP-W6-13) rather than an inheritance. The same discipline covers the rest of the truck list: celery, potatoes and the other muck crops of the region's fame are named for this ground by no source read, and print as tested absences beside the two crops — onions and cucumbers — that the record does carry. Orchards and small fruit stand the same: no Lincoln Township orchard is named in any source read (GAP-W6-14).

Sources:

1. Polk 1916–17, pt. 2, Walkerton entry (Beal; Erickson; Stouffer; Piowaty M & Son — onion buyers and storage), read whole.
2. Howard (1907), vol. 2: the Atwood sketch (the 1903 pickle works) and the Jerry R. Woodward sketch (Penn Township's peppermint farm — boundary).
3. Starke County Historical Timeline, comp. Marvin Allen, Starke County Historian (the 1919 mint entry — boundary, the neighboring county's record).