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THE POST OFFICE OF 1851, HALF A MILE SOUTH
Before either plat, the place had a name and a post office, and they were not Walkerton. Chapman: the West York post office was established in 1851 by C. W. N. Stephens, half a mile south of the townsite; in 1854 Stephens built the first house in Walkerton and its first store, on ground then "covered with a dense thicket," with no roads laid out. The sequence matters to the town's internal geography: the postal seat preceded the plats by three to five years and stood outside both of them, so the combined town's oldest named place is neither of its plats but a post office south of them both, whose neighborhood is the town's southern approach today. West York survives as a name in the record — the mission from which the Methodist congregation of 1859 descended, in Chapman's church account — rather than as a living district; the modern town carries no West York street or subdivision name in any record, and the name's course after the post office's removal into the town is a gap the postal records would settle, named in this build's note.