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Chicago: Chas. C. Chapman & Co., 1880 — read first-hand
What it is: the first full history of the county, and the base layer under this build's nineteenth century. For Walkerton the passes read the Lincoln Township chapter (pp. 733–735) whole: the township's organization, its first officers, its first things — and, in the chapter's village passage, the town's own first business census, the merchants and mechanics of the 1870s from whom the Businesses leg takes its earliest roll. The biographical sketches that follow the township chapters (pp. 748–750) carry the settler families at sketch depth, and the volume's "Dark Deeds" chapter carries the county's early crime record at the strength the Crime leg prints. What Chapman is good for, on this ground, is the first fifty years at connected-account strength: settlement, organization, the first law and the first trade, told by a compiler working within living memory of most of it.
Its limits, from this build's experience: two, and both printed where they bite. His incorporation passage is internally conflicted — the volume's own tellings of the town's incorporation do not reconcile with each other — and the Story of Walkerton section leg prints the conflict whole rather than choosing, settling the date instead from the commissioners' docket the pass reconstructed (petitions of 1873 and 1876; the order of June 8, 1877). And the machine copies carry name noise: the artificial-intelligence OCR of the digitized text renders settler names in variants (the Hawe/Haven instability the Neighborhoods leg works through), so every Chapman name in this build that matters was checked against the page image or a second carrier. The rule the Granger build states governs here too: the page image is the source; the transcription is a convenience.
Principal sources: Chapman (1880), Lincoln Township chapter and sketches, read first-hand (archive.org full text, page-checked); the Story of Walkerton section and Businesses legs' own articles for the passages as used.