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ITEMS 2–3 · THE TOWN'S OWN WORKS AT THEIR SIZE; THE WAR TEST NEGATIVE
The leg's founding-works article asks for the factory that made the technology itself — the streetlight works, the electrical anchor — and Walkerton's honest equivalent is the one works the town built as a town: its municipal electric plant. No streetlight or electrical-goods factory ever stood here in any record reached; the town's manufactures ran to cut glass, bottles, food, and later composites. The electrical work the town did own was generation and distribution: Walkerton was a municipal-ownership town — Howard's 1907 line on its town-owned utilities is the banked frame — running its own electric light (and water) as a public work of the progressive-era pattern, the plant and the poles a technology the town operated rather than bought as a service. That course stands at frame strength in the banked set, and this section does not inflate it: the plant's founding date, machinery, and succession stand in the town's utility records and minutes, named as this item's settler class in the run note. The war-production test: the anchor-firm wartime record the checklist draws from Bendix's South Bend — brake and aviation technology built for the war — has no Walkerton member: the town's documented works of 1941–45 are its farms and its food trade; the cut-glass works was a generation dead; Polygon was founded in 1949, after the war it might have served; and no Walkerton firm's wartime product stands in the Tribune's war-production coverage or the firms' own records as reached. The test prints negative whole, with the boundary kept clean: Studebaker's and Bendix's war work is South Bend's and Mishawaka's, and none of it is imported here on a shared county line.
Principal sources: Government (the municipal-ownership frame, Howard 1907); Businesses (the manufactures course); war-production coverage at search strength, November 2026.