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WHAT THE JUNCTION BOUGHT AND SOLD
Three years after incorporation, Chapman took the town's commercial census, and it is the balance sheet of a wheat market: four dry-goods houses, three drug stores, two hotels, two depots and one grain depot, two printing offices, a town hall owned by Jacob Bender, and, by Chapman's summary, some fifty business men in the trade of the place (Chapman, pp. 733–735). The figure that measures the town best is his last: "about 200,000 bushels of wheat purchased in the 1880 season" — the drained township's harvest, wagoned to the junction and exchanged for the dry goods on the shelves. The two printing offices were the town's two newspapers, whose courses Howard completes: the Walkerton Visitor, first issued by Henry S. Mintle on 7 April 1875 — Mintle died 13 May 1886, the paper was sold to J. F. Endly and renamed the Walkerton Independent, and Endly's son William A. Endly still conducted it when Howard wrote — and the St. Joseph County Republican, started by J. F. Endly in 1879, sold in 1881 to D. M. Eveland, passed then to Needham and to Burroughs & Son, and ceased, its presses removed to La Porte (Howard, pp. 316–317; Chapman, pp. 733–735). The newspapers' full courses are the Media leg's; the Story of Walkerton section carries the founding facts because for thirty years the Independent's office was one of the town's two fixed points — the other being the depots. A grain town with two railroads, two newspapers, a town hall and fifty business men, on 135 incorporated acres: that is Walkerton at the opening of its municipal life, and the scale held, roughly, for sixty years.