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PEO-8 DUG · CHAPMAN (1880) WITH HOWARD (1907)
The banked leg named the founders; the county histories, read whole, give them their acts. C. W. N. Stephens is the ground-floor man: he established the West York post office in 1851 as its first postmaster — half a mile south of the present town, when the mail came by hack from La Porte to Plymouth — built the first house in Walkerton in 1854, erected the first store building, and was still postmaster when Chapman wrote in 1880. Christian Fulmer and his family made the township's first settlement in the fall of 1835 (his son Oliver's sketch carries the father's whole arc: born October 4, 1799, a drummer boy at thirteen in the War of 1812, Drum Major in the Mexican War and again in the Civil War — three wars under arms — a Baptist fifty years and a Mason fifty, dead December 6, 1878). Jacob Rupel, born November 28, 1806 in Preble County, Ohio, came to the county in 1835 by his own sketch's telling, stood among the organizers of Liberty Township, was renowned up and down the settlement as a deer-hunter, and became the town's addition-maker: Howard's plat record gives Jacob Rupel's first three additions to Walkerton recorded December 11, 1868, a fourth on July 2, 1875, and a fifth on January 23, 1884. The plats themselves are Howard's: West Troy laid out by Elias D. Jones and platted December 14, 1854; Walkerton platted June 20, 1856 by William C. Hannah; Burk's addition to West Troy April 27, 1860; Dixon W. Place's first addition September 3, 1887. Against that record Chapman's telling — Walkerton "laid out in March, 1857, by one Mr. Allen" — stands as the divergent early form, printed in the before-the-city addendum as a claim, not a correction. The Rupel date carries its own tangle, banked as a delta candidate (DF-W-30): the atlas directory's 1837 against the sketch's 1835, and a Rudduck marriage of August 1, 1833 to an Elizabeth Rupel, "daughter of Jacob and Susanna Rupel," which cannot belong to the Jacob born in 1806 and points to an older same-name household; the deed record is the final settler.
Principal sources: Chapman (1880), Lincoln Township chapter and sketches (Stephens, Fulmer, Rupel, Rudduck); Howard (1907), pp. 316–317 (the plat record).