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The test, stated before its result: a company museum exists where a firm keeps its own collection as an institution — the checklist's yardstick is the Studebaker sequence in the sister build, a company collection begun by the firm's own purchases, formalized as a corporate museum in 1916, and given to its city in 1966. Run against Walkerton's two candidate firms, the test returns a clean negative. The Central Cut Glass Co. collected nothing that any record reached shows: it was a Chicago company's Factory No. 2, it lived nine years (1910–1919), and it ended in the fire of 19 February 1919 with its stock of blanks new in the building; no company collection, showroom archive, or works museum appears in the society's exhibit history of the firm, which is drawn from the town paper and is the fullest account the record holds. What survives of the works — the pieces, the photographs, the cornerstone record — survives because the historical society collected it afterward: the cut-glass heritage is a society collection about a company, not a company collecting itself, and the distinction is the finding. The modern candidate fails the same test the other way: Polygon Company — Polygon Composites Technology, founded 1949, headquartered in Walkerton with plants on Industrial Park Drive and Tennessee Street — is a living firm with a long local course, and no company museum, heritage collection, or public archive of its own appears in any record reached for this build, its corporate profiles included. The result prints at its true size: on this ground, industry never kept itself; the town's memory of its factories is kept entirely by the town's society.
Sources: Walkerton Area Historical Society, "The Story of Walkerton's Central Cut Glass Company (Factory No. 2)," Walkerton Digital Library exhibit, read November 2026 (the firm's whole course; no company collection). Businesses leg of this build (the anchor-manufactures article: the works' course; Polygon Company — founded 1949, Walkerton headquarters, present state).