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Famous Stories & the Record

#215 — The national-history-object test: the collection catalogue, swept

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The test asks whether the town's collection holds an object of national history improbably seated here — the class of thing this build elsewhere calls the Lincoln-carriage class, after the South Bend museum's famous resident. The catalogue swept is the Walkerton Digital Library, the Heritage Society's Omeka archive, which describes its holdings as "physical objects, postcards, photographs, artifacts, maps, etc." and then states its own present limit plainly: "Here so far we only are featuring the Central Cut Glass or Walkerton Cut Glass collection items." That featured collection — the output of the town's own glass factory (Factory No. 2, 1910–1919), the Central Cut Glass / Walkerton Cut Glass ware already treated in this build — is the only collection the online catalogue in fact offers. It is locally made art glass of genuine craft interest, and it is not an object of national history improbably seated here: it is improbable nowhere, being exactly where it was made.

The result therefore prints at its true size, which is a searched negative at catalogue strength. No carriage, no relic, no object whose national story would make its presence in Walkerton a surprise appears in the collection catalogue as published. The residue is named rather than hidden: the society's offline holdings at the Walkerton Heritage Museum — the accession record behind the published catalogue — were not swept, and they are the settler for anything the online catalogue has not yet featured. The test as run, against the catalogue the institution publishes to the world, returns the town's own glass and nothing else.

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Source: #215 — The national-history-object test: the collection catalogue, swept, Moosed History by Project Moosed, https://history.projectmoosed.com/usa/midwest/indiana/walkerton/stories-told/215-the-national-history-object-test-the-collection-catalogue/