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Walkerton's first factories did not only serve the town; they stocked the country around it. The banked gazetteer canvasses, read together as one trade, show a town selling intermediate goods — the things other people's production runs on. First among them, cooperage stock: the town carried two barrel-hoop factories in the canvasses of the early 1880s, of which Leiher & Thompson is the one the record names — hoops and staves out the door to every barrel-maker and packing house the railroads could reach, a trade that exists only because other industries, elsewhere, had things to put in barrels.
The planing mill sold the same way. Schwartz & Tischer's planing mill, set up in the fall of 1873, turned out sash, doors and blinds — not houses, but the finished parts houses are assembled from — and dealt besides in iron roofing, the skin of other men's barns and shops. Even the mill's own machinery was an intermediate good moving between small towns: it came from the Home Manufacturing Company of North Liberty, one township town equipping another. The trade runs through the canvasses in smaller lines of the same kind: J. Willis Cotton's agricultural implements, sewing machines and pumps; Andrew Cunningham's 1882 advertisement of steam engines and threshers — the prime movers of the next farm and the next mill, sold off a Walkerton floor; Henderson's lumber and grain in 1884; and the Walkerton Lumber Company of the 1916 canvass, still selling the raw stock of building to builders. The cut-glass and pickle works of the next generation shipped finished goods to consumers; the hoop factory, the planing mill and the implement dealers shipped capacity. That is the article the canvasses support, and it is the town's first industrial character: before Walkerton made things, it made the means of making things.
Willis Cotton; Andrew Cunningham advertisement, 1882; Henderson lumber & grain, 1884; Walkerton Lumber Co., 1916.