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WHO WAS ON THE PLATS, TWENTY YEARS IN
The atlas that drew the plats also listed the township, name by name — and its Lincoln Township directory (pp. 99, 102) is the built town's first census of itself. Under the Walkerton post office the directory carries the plats' working population at trade strength: farming and stock raising on section 23; a brick mason and plasterer in the county since 1872; furniture and undertaking (1873); general merchandise in the hands of a German-born merchant settled in 1861; blacksmithing and wagon making (1866); physicians and dentists (1872); a physician and druggist from Noble County (1866); the Walkerton House, the town's hotel, kept by a New Yorker of 1863; and a stage route and mail agency to South Bend held by a man in the county since 1840 — the plats' connection to the county seat still running on hooves the year the atlas drew the second railroad into town. Beyond the plats, the same directory carries the township's farm fabric the town served: Prussian-born farmers on sections 11 and 12, in since 1858, among them. Chapman's 1880 census of the town's business — some fifty business men, four dry-goods stores, two hotels, two saloons, and no bank — is the Story of Walkerton section's and Businesses' to print whole; the directory's value here is the plat-level grain: by 1875 the combined plats held the full kit of a farm town's trades, and the names of the householders stand in the atlas at the county library's copy for any pass that mines the directory whole.