The United Brethren church: "the beautiful church of that denomination in Walkerton"

by 1907–1968

The United Brethren congregation is the least documented of Howard's five, and the one whose members the record happens to name. Howard's town and township lists seat the United Brethren among Walkerton's churches in 1907 without a founding date, and no founding date was reached; the congregation enters the record through its people. David L. Swank — Stark County-born, a veteran of Company D, 22nd Indiana Infantry, and a member of Walkerton's Jesse Coppie GAR post — was a United Brethren member who, his 1907 sketch records, "assisted materially in the erection of the beautiful church of that denomination in Walkerton." His wife Malinda was a devout member and a worker in the congregation's Ladies' Aid Society; his parents Conrad and Dorcas, who died at Walkerton in 1885 and 1894, were members of the same church. The congregation was still standing in the town's directory portrait of 1916–17, when Polk lists "Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian and United Brethren churches" — the four-church line in which the United Brethren, and not the Baptists or Adventists, survive. Its records survive institutionally: the SBAGS church-records index carries a "Walkerton Evangelical United Brethren" congregation, its records at the St. Joseph County Public Library — the "Evangelical" in the name dating the records line to the denomination's 1946 union form.

What happened next is nationally ordinary and locally undocumented. In 1968 the Evangelical United Brethren Church united with the Methodist Church to form the United Methodist Church, and in town after town the EUB congregation merged into the Methodist one. For Walkerton, no source reached documents that merger, a separate continuation, or a closing; no congregation of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ — the branch that did not join the 1968 union — was found in Walkerton in any modern directory searched. The article therefore closes the United Brethren course at the strength the record carries: a congregation seated by 1907, building a church its members were proud of, present in 1916–17, recorded under its 1946–68 name in the county's records index, and thereafter unaccounted for in the sources reached — its likely absorption into the congregation now worshiping as Walkerton Community Church stated as the ordinary pattern, not as a Walkerton fact.

Sources

1. Howard (1907), vol. 1, pp. 290–291, 316–317; vol. 2, pp. 979–980 (Swank sketch), read first-hand.
2. Polk, Indiana Gazetteer & Business Directory, 1916–17, Walkerton entry (churches line).
3. SBAGS church-records index (Walkerton Evangelical United Brethren — records at SJCPL), sbags.org.
4. Modern directory searches for a Church of the United Brethren in Christ congregation at Walkerton: none found, stated at search strength.