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The test admits one kind of evidence: documentation that a famous name performed in Walkerton. Run across the record reached, the claims sort into three piles, and only the smallest pile is performances. Pile one — performances documented in Walkerton, none of them famous names: the opera-house evening of 20 April 1901, a minstrel entertainment "under the direction of Geo. W. Barnes" for the high-school library (banked, Arts) — a community production by a local director; and the town band's own appearances, at the Lapaz G.A.R. reunion of September 1895 and across its Military Band years. Pile two — famous names attached to Walkerton who did not perform here on any record reached: Barry L. Houser, whose fame is as a conductor at Illinois and whose Walkerton record is as a student drum major (article #188) — an alumnus, not a visiting performer; Harold C. Urey and Walter LaFeber, the town's famous sons of the laboratory and the library, neither a musician. Pile three — the claim that does not survive checking: no source reached documents a Sousa, a touring opera company, a name dance orchestra, a radio or recording artist, or any nationally known musician performing in Walkerton, in the opera-house era or after; the opera house stood and operated in 1901, and its bills, beyond the one banked evening, are inside the same named gap as its building (GAP-W-ART-1). The test therefore cannot carry "one documented concert whole," because the one documented concert is the 1901 minstrel benefit — carried whole in the banked set, pointed to here, and honestly local. Result: no famous performance in Walkerton is documented in the record reached; the town's documented performers are its own. That is printed not as a disappointment but as the test's finding — a town of two thousand whose music record is a record of residents is a finding about how music actually lived in such towns, and the settler for any future claim is fixed: a dated bill, program or newspaper notice in the Independent's run or the society's collections, naming the performer and the Walkerton house.
Sources: Walkerton Independent, 20 April 1901; Wars leg (1895 cornet band); University of Illinois Archives (Houser); this section's searches of the web and directory record for touring performers at Walkerton, November 2026 — negative as stated. Closure: TRUE SIZE — the test run and printed at its result; settler as named in the article.