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The Ethnic and National Societies, at Their True Size

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The layer is thinner here, and the thinness is the finding. Tested against the banked register read whole and the town paper record reached, Walkerton seats no ethnic or national society of any kind: no Polish Falcons nest, no Hungarian, Italian, German, or Belgian society, no national parish fraternal, no ethnic hall. The register's sixty-four lines contain none; Howard's 1907 memberships contain none; no society of the class surfaces in the record reached at any date. The immigrant presence itself is real and banked elsewhere in this build — the 1875 atlas prints a German-born merchant in town since 1861, and Prussian-born farm families stand in the population record — but presence never became organization on this ground: the farm families' institutions were their churches (the religion record carries them), and no secular ethnic society ever formed at this town's size.

The county's ethnic-society layer is South Bend's and Mishawaka's, seated where the industrial immigrant wards were, and it is printed here only as the boundary it is: the Falcons nests, the Hungarian and Belgian halls, the nationality parishes' societies of the county seat belong to the South Bend record. Walkerton's true size on this item is one paragraph and a negative: tested, and not here.

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Source: The Ethnic and National Societies, at Their True Size, Moosed History by Project Moosed, https://history.projectmoosed.com/usa/midwest/indiana/walkerton/private-clubs/ethnic-and-national-societies-at-their-true-size/