Pine Creek, Tested as a Power Source

The test was run on the whole record the build holds: the county histories, the gazetteer canvasses, the topographic sheet and the fire-insurance map record, asked one question — was Pine Creek ever measured as a mill power on this ground, a fall counted, a race dug, a dam raised? The answer the record gives is no. No fall in feet, no mill-race, no dam, no water privilege is named for Pine Creek at Walkerton in Chapman (1880), in Howard (1907), or in any gazetteer or directory canvass the build has banked. The creek runs through the town's ground on the USGS Walkerton quadrangle, and the ground itself is the flat lake-plain the Story of Walkerton section records — the town stands at 725 feet — but no surveyor's fall figure for the creek at the town was found in any source reached.

What the record measures instead is steam.Between those two steam plants the town's milling record runs unbroken, and nowhere in it does a water wheel appear. The Rogers flour mill, the town's first great works, is named in the sources by its owners and its years — Rogers & Son in 1882, Rogers Bros. in 1884 — and by nothing else: no source reached states its power at all. The honest print of the test is therefore double: water power on Pine Creek was never developed on this ground in any record reached, and the power the record can measure, from first to last, is steam. The records that could still settle the creek's fall are named: the Walkerton sheets in the Sanborn fire-insurance series, held for 305 Indiana places by Indiana University's Indiana Spatial Data Portal and the Indiana State Library, whose Walkerton editions were not enumerated sheet by sheet, and the Lincoln Township deed record, where a mill-race or water-privilege grant would have to live if one was ever made.