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(a) The marker-in-bronze test. The Urey marker's inscription is banked read-whole in the W-11 addendum, and its text was tested line by line for an actual error. The marker stands on Roosevelt Road (U.S. 6) at Illinois Street, erected by American Legion Post No. 189 "to designate the birthplace of Scientist, Educator, Lecturer, Author Harold C. Urey — 1934 Nobel Prize Winner for his discovery of heavy hydrogen or deuterium," and it closes: "Born April 29, 1893 at Walkerton Indiana to Samuel Clayton and Cora Rebecca (Reinoehl) Urey." Every checkable statement in it checks: the birth date, the birthplace, both parents, the Nobel year and the discovery are all correct. The mother's maiden name is the point the test most carefully separates out: Reinoehl is the family's correct spelling, corroborated by the standard references, and the variants of it that appear in print (Reinsehl among them, printed in the W-11 addendum as a variant) are variants — a spelling variant is not an error, and the bronze here has the right form. What the marker also carries is period voice: the sentence "Through his discovery, of deuterium, the, hydrogen bomb, became possible" is the booster compression of its era, a claim about consequence cast in awkward punctuation — the commas, as transcribed in the marker database, may be the transcription's own artifacts, and no punctuation error is asserted against the bronze from a transcription. Period voice is not error either. The town's second marker, the Walkerton World War II Memorial in Woodlawn Cemetery (erected 1947 by Mothers of World War II, Walkerton Unit 140 — "In Memory of the Valiant Sons, and Daughters, of This Area, Who Served Their Country in the Armed Services in World War II"), likewise contains no factual error found. One distinctness caution closes the test: the state historical marker for Dr. Harold C. Urey announced for 2026 stands at Corunna, in DeKalb County, where Urey was raised and is buried; it is a different marker, and Walkerton's Legion marker is not a state marker. Verdict: no actual error in bronze was found on this ground; the test's yield is the distinction itself — error, variant and period voice are three different things, and Walkerton's bronze commits only the third.
(b) The river's strangest numbers. The template numbers that travel with this section — the matching pair and the larger figure — do not belong to this reach of the Kankakee, and they are not imported: the 12.70-foot figure, for instance, belongs to the early record of the gauge near Wilmington, Illinois (July 11, 1915; 22,400 cubic feet per second), far downstream on a different datum. This reach's own record, from the United States Geological Survey's Indiana water-data volumes, stands as follows. The nearest gauge is the Kankakee River near North Liberty (station 05515000, record from January 1951, datum 680.04 feet NGVD29): its maximum peak flow is 908 cubic feet per second, on March 17, 1982 — while its maximum peak stage is 9.04 feet, on June 27, 1968, in a different event altogether; the station's own remarks warn that records above 300 cubic feet per second are affected by backwater and are poor. The next gauge downstream, the Kankakee River at Davis in Starke County (station 05515500, record from 1924, with a fragment from 1905–06), shows the same divorce larger: maximum peak flow 1,920 cubic feet per second on March 20, 1982, against a maximum peak stage of 13.79 feet on July 19, 1996. The strangest numbers on this river are therefore a pair of non-coincidences: the highest water ever measured here did not fall in the year of the greatest flow, at either gauge — stage and discharge part company on a low, backwater-prone river where ice and downstream water can stand the gauge high on modest flow. Printed as the record stands, that divorce, and not any borrowed figure, is this reach's record oddity.
Sources: Historical Marker Database records m=75604 (Urey marker, photographed by Duane Hall, July 21, 2014) and m=75605 (Walkerton World War II Memorial), inscriptions as transcribed there and banked read-whole in the W-11 addendum; Indiana Historical Bureau record distinguishing the 2026 Corunna Urey marker; U.S. Geological Survey, Water Resources Data for Indiana, water years 2002 and 2004 (stations 05515000 North Liberty, 05515500 Davis, 05518000 Shelby, 05527500 Wilmington).