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WALKERTON IN ITS TWO LARGER GEOGRAPHIES
Walkerton is a small town inside a mid-sized urban county, and the two facts must not be traded for each other. St. Joseph County counted 272,912 people in 2020 (the PL file, reproduced cell-for-cell), up from 266,931 in 2010 and 247,052 in 1990; its own mid-century line, from the 1950 volume, runs 160,033 in 1930, 161,823 in 1940, and 205,058 in 1950 — the county shared the war decade's jump at county scale (+26.7 percent) while Walkerton, at the plant's door, took it at nearly three times that rate. The town's 2,096 is about three-quarters of one percent of the county's 2020 count. The town lies inside the South Bend–Mishawaka metropolitan statistical area, whose federal definition is the whole of St. Joseph County, Indiana, with Cass County, Michigan — 324,501 people in 2020 on the sister pass's PL summation — so Walkerton is a metropolitan place by the county line, at the metro's rural southwest edge, some thirteen miles from the urban core its residents orient to. The township's share of the county story is the mirror of the town's: Lincoln Township is the county's least populous civil township in the modern record, farm country in a suburbanizing county, which is precisely the contrast the two series in this section keep visible — the town doubling in a war decade and holding, the township peaking in 2010 and thinning, the county growing around both.