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FOLK-6 DUG · THE TOWN'S KEEPSAKES NAMED FROM THE RECORD
The keepsake-money test asks what objects carry the town's memory at market and at home — what a Walkerton family keeps, and what a collector pays for — and the record answers with one ware and one box. The ware is Central Cut Glass: the town's nine-year industry left a portable, attributable, tradable object in a way no other Walkerton product did — the historical society's own digital library is founded on the collection, piece by piece, and "Walkerton cut glass" functions in the antiques trade as a named origin. The pickle jars and the door plant's output carry no such name; the glass is the keepsake, and it is also the town's one folkloric commodity, the thing whose presence in a cabinet certifies the town to strangers. The box is the copper receptacle the building committee sealed into the glass factory's cornerstone on April 30, 1910, with memorials inside — the town's one documented time capsule of the heroic age, sealed by Ross, Place, and Turner before the schoolchildren's song was done. Its fate is the item's honest tail: the works burned in 1919 and was never rebuilt, and whether the cornerstone box was recovered from the ruin stands in no record reached; the capsule's recovery, if any, is the residue, with the society's museum record as its settler.
Principal sources: WAHS Central Cut Glass exhibit (the cornerstone ceremony and the collection); the Walkerton Digital Library (the collection as the society's founding exhibit).