Two plats, on the record: West Troy 1854, Walkerton 1856

HOWARD'S PLAT RECORD, AND CHAPMAN'S TELLING BESIDE IT

The town was platted twice, by two proprietors, and the county's two histories do not tell it the same way. Howard, writing from the plat record, gives the instruments: West Troy was platted on 14 December 1854 by Elias D. Jones, on the southeast part of the northeast quarter of section 23, Township 35 North, Range 1 West; and Walkerton was platted on 20 June 1856 by William C. Hannah, on the southwest quarter of section 24, in the same township and range (Howard, pp. 316–317). Chapman, a generation earlier and looser, writes that Walkerton was "laid out in March, 1857, by one Mr. Allen," and West Troy "laid out in 1855" (Chapman, pp. 733–735). The conflict prints whole: Howard names the proprietor and the day for each plat and follows the record the county kept; Chapman's account names a Mr. Allen whom Howard's record nowhere shows, and a March 1857 that no instrument in the record reached confirms. The 1875 atlas stands with Howard on the one point where its chronology speaks legibly: its year-by-year county chronology enters "Village of West Troy laid out in Lincoln Township" under 1854. The modern reference line ("Walkerton was platted in 1856") follows Howard. The Story of Walkerton section owns the settlement of this interlock for the build, and this section follows it: the plats are Jones's of December 1854 and Hannah's of June 1856, and Chapman's Allen stands in the record as the town's first telling of itself — unverified against the plat books, whose reading is the named settler, named in this build's note. The name carries the same split: Howard states it as settled that the town was "named from John Walker, the promoter of a railroad through the town" — the road from Plymouth to La Porte, known at first as the Indianapolis, Peru & Chicago — and the standard references follow him.