Notable People of Walkerton: Settlers, Editors, a Superintendent and a Nobel Chemist

People · Settlers, Editors, a Superintendent, and a Nobel Chemist

Walkerton is a town of about two thousand people, and its people-record is sized like it — but it holds one name the whole world knows. The town was founded twice over, in two rival plats, West Troy and Walkerton, and its founding record disagrees with itself in print: the county's two histories give different platters-by, different naming stories, and different incorporation years, and this section prints the disagreements whole rather than picking winners. Its first families are known by name from 1835. Its nineteenth century is carried by a handful of documented men — a settler who platted the town's additions for thirty years, the editor who founded its newspaper and the son who kept it, the leading citizen who briefed the county historian — and its twentieth by an educator who built its modern school corporation and was himself a Korean War soldier. Above them all stands a boy born here in 1893 who left as a small child and came back never, so far as the record shows, except in the form of a state marker: Harold Clayton Urey, who found heavy hydrogen and took the Nobel Prize for it. The fame band prints his tie at its exact strength — born here — and does the same for the astronaut whose name is on the high school, who was born in Ohio and stood in Walkerton exactly once, on the record, to dedicate the building that bears his name.