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THE GROUND AS THE SURVEY AND THE CENSUS FRAME IT
The land under Walkerton is the southwest corner block of St. Joseph County: the town's plats occupy the southeast part of the northeast quarter of section 23 and the southwest quarter of section 24, Township 35 North, Range 1 West of the Second Principal Meridian, as Howard prints the plat record. The civil frame around them, Lincoln Township, was detached from Liberty Township in June 1866 (Chapman, read first-hand for this build). The modern measurements agree with the old geometry. The Census Bureau's 2020 Gazetteer file gives the town a land area of 4,917,115 square meters — 1.899 square miles — and no water area at all; its internal point stands at 41.4657 degrees north, 86.4825 degrees west. Lincoln Township's published polygon measures 57,543,749 square meters of land, about 22.2 square miles. Chapman's 1880 area table states the same ground in the tax record's terms: Lincoln Township, 13,395 taxable acres, and the town of Walkerton, 135 acres, the town lots taxed separately from the township around them. The Kankakee River does not cross this ground; it bounds it — Chapman's physical chapter runs the river's county course by section from its rise in section 9, Township 37 North, Range 2 East, about a mile west of South Bend, southwest through the ranges to sections 12 and 13 of Township 36 North, Range 1 West, and into La Porte County — which is to say, past the north and west of Lincoln Township, a few miles from the townsite, in the marsh plain this section now takes up.