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FOLK-7 (STORIES) MIXED · THE 1907 END DUG VERBATIM, THE 2019 END STANDING
The town's famous sentence has stood in this build at paraphrase strength; Howard's page now supplies it whole, closing the 1907 Walkerton section like a peroration. Timothy Edward Howard, A History of St. Joseph County (1907), page 318, the last paragraph of the Walkerton section: "With its enterprising citizens, its fine farming surroundings and its excellent railroad facilities, Walkerton is, besides, well located, being at a sufficient distance from South Bend, Laporte, Plymouth and Knox to admit of free and ample growth. Its future is assured; and St. Joseph county has good cause to be proud of her southwestern capital." The section's opening makes the pair: "The town of Walkerton… is one of the most flourishing centers in northern Indiana. Except the cities of South Bend and Mishawaka, it is the largest and most important municipal corporation in St. Joseph county." The growth line the checklist asks for — Howard 1907 to Hoganson 2019 — prints with its far end standing: the 2019 town-history form of the sentence's afterlife was not reached in this section's sources, and it stands as the residue with its settler named, the 2019 town history text itself. Nicoles, and the section's booster matter is credited to him in the text — which is how a town's fame is actually manufactured: a prominent resident's estimate, a respected history's imprimatur, and a century of quotation. The population claim inside it was already generous in 1907 (Nicoles estimated 1,500 against the census's 1,037 of 1900), and the sentence is printed here as what it is — the town's founding boast, verbatim, with its provenance on its face.
Principal sources: Howard (1907), A History of St. Joseph County, vol. 1, pp. 316–318 (read whole, including the Nicoles attribution and the preface's thanks).