The press: Mintle founded it, the Endlys kept it

1875 – 1907 and after

Henry S. Mintle founded the town's first newspaper: "The first newspaper established in the town was the Walkerton Visitor, the first copy of which was issued by Henry S. Mintle, April 7, 1875. Mr. Mintle continued the publication until his death, May 13, 1886" (Howard). Eleven years of the town's first record of itself, from one man's press.

J. F. Endly bought the paper at Mintle's death in 1886, "changed the name to the Walkerton Independent," and had already, in 1879, started "the St. Joseph County Republican, which, in 1881, he sold to D. M. Eveland" (Howard) — the Republican afterward passing to Theodore Needham, then to Burroughs & Son, and at last to LaPorte. His biography in Goodspeed's Pictorial and Biographical Memoirs (1893) fills the man in at sketch strength: he came back to the county in July 1886 from Chicago, where he had worked at his trade, "and bought out what was then the Visitor, of Walkerton, and changed it to the Independent, which he has since controlled and published. The paper is a spicy, independent, six-column, eight-page quarto." In 1888 he married Nellie Jones, "daughter of Prof. J. A. Jones, formerly principal of the Walkerton schools" — which is where the schools' principal enters this section, at his daughter's marriage line. The merged paper of the modern town, the Independent-News, is the Independent's descendant in the town's record, and it is the newspaper whose columns carry most of what this build knows of Walkerton's twentieth century.

William A. Endly, the son, "has continued the publication of the Independent" since his father's death, and by 1907 was, in Howard's phrase, "the enterprising editor and proprietor of the Walkerton Independent," owner and occupant of the two-story cement-stone building in the business part of town that Samuel Nicoles' account singles out. Father and son between them carried the town's paper from 1886 past the century's turn; the paper's own archive, on film at the Walkerton Heritage Museum for 1886–1996, is the settler for everything this section could not reach in its columns.

Sources:

1. Howard, Ch. IX §5, p. 317 — the Visitor, the Independent, the Republican, and the Endlys.
2. Goodspeed Brothers, Pictorial and Biographical Memoirs of Elkhart and St. Joseph Counties (1893) — the J. F. Endly sketch, read in the book's digitized transcription.
3. Town of Walkerton, official history page — the museum's newspaper microfilm holdings (Walkerton papers, 1886–1996).