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FOLK-9 MIXED · THE NAMES READ FROM CHAPMAN AND HOWARD
The checklist asks what the immigrants named: whether Walkerton's map carries the marks of the peoples who settled it, the way other townships carry a Bremen or a Germania. The map's answer, from the two county histories read whole, is that the town's names are railroad-and-compass names, not homeland names. Walkerton itself is a man's name — John Walker, the railroad promoter (Howard). Its Siamese first plat is West Troy (1854) — a classical-republican borrowing of the era, Troy by way of New York — and its postal predecessor is West York (1851), another compass-and-county name carried west. No German, Brethren, or immigrant place-name stands on the Lincoln Township map in either history: the immigration that peopled the township (the German-named Cripes, Rupels, Tischers, Schwartzes, and Fulmers of the Chapman roll) named farms and families, not places — the naming power in 1850s Lincoln Township belonged to the post office, the railroad, and the plat book, and those institutions named in English. The township's own name is the exception that proves the frame: Lincoln, imposed by petition in 1866 in a martyred president's honor, a political name, not an ethnic one. The residue prints with its settler: the 1875 atlas plates and directory (pp. 99–102 and the plat pages), which would catch any farm-neighborhood name the histories passed over, stand unopened by this section and are named for the next runner.
Principal sources: Chapman (1880), Lincoln Township chapter (West York, West Troy, the 1866 naming); Howard (1907), pp. 316–317 (Walker; the plats).