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The sequence, dated at record strength, runs in four states. Water first — as a test, not a state: Pine Creek was never developed as a mill power on this ground in any record reached, and the town's industry begins with the state that followed. Steam is the first power the record can date and size: the Cripe steam saw-mill stands in Chapman's 1880 history already a failure behind it, and steam is still the works power a generation later in the cut-glass plant of 1910, boilered at 60 horsepower. Electricity arrives as a municipal act: by 1907 Howard's municipal record shows the town keeping its own electric light plant, and the 1916 Polk canvass lists "electric lights" among the town's own utilities — Walkerton made its current before it bought it, and it was still running its municipal electric utility at the century's end, when in December 2000 the town council weighed cutting the electric rate — an average 600-kilowatt-hour bill of $37.04 proposed down to $31.48 — against raising the sewer rate.
The last state is purchased current, and its frame is dated even where the town's own joining is not. The Indiana Municipal Power Agency, the joint-action agency through which Indiana towns buy power in common, began operations in 1983; its Integrated Resource Plans of 2011 and 2023, filed with the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission, list Walkerton among the IMPA communities, in the NIPSCO load zone — the town's current, in the present arrangement, arrives over the northern Indiana utility's wires under a municipal agency's contract. The exact year Walkerton passed from its own plant to agency purchase was not found in any source reached, and is left open at that size: the transition is framed — municipal plant by 1907, municipal utility still rating its own bills in 2000, IMPA membership on the filed plans of 2011 and 2023 — and the year inside the frame waits on the town's own minutes and the agency's membership record.