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THE SERIES' HINGE, WITH ITS CAUSE AS THE RECORD STATES IT
Between 1940 and 1950 the town grew by 78.4 percent — 1,178 people became 2,102 — and the township grew with it, 1,791 to 2,770. No other decade in either series moves like it. The cause stands in the record at two strengths. The Story of Walkerton section, on the plant history as carried in the town's reference record, states it directly: "During World War II Walkerton housed some of the workers for the nearby Kingsbury Ordnance Plant." The plant's own record supplies the scale: built from 1940 on about 13,454 acres — twenty square miles — of La Porte County land some eight to ten miles west of the town, one of the nation's largest shell-loading plants; it sought 10,000 workers against the entire 1940 population of La Porte city, 16,000; loaded its first shells in August 1941; and by May 1942 employed 20,785 people, about half of them women, recruited across a fifty-mile radius, with the War Department building an entire town — Kingsford Heights, more than 2,600 dormitories, trailers, and prefabricated homes — at the factory gates. Walkerton, the closest established town to the gate with rooms, houses, and a railroad junction, took its share of a workforce that arrived faster than housing anywhere could be built for it, and kept the people after the plant demobilized — it reopened for Korea in 1951 and closed permanently in 1959, inside the plateau decade, without the town's count breaking. The home front at name strength — who came, where they lived — is the Wars leg's record, pursued from the wartime press and the plant's housing files; this section carries the figure and the documented frame, and prints no Walkerton-specific worker count, because none survives in the record reached.