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THE SECOND MUNICIPALITY OF THE COUNTY, AS ITS INFORMANT TOLD IT
The fullest single portrait of the town ever printed is Howard's, drawn from the statement of Samuel J. Nicoles, the Walkerton man Howard thanks for the entry — and it is a portrait of a town that owned itself: compactly built, good homes, two-story brick business buildings, an excellent hotel, and a two-story cement-stone building of Endly's raising; the Walkerton State Bank, capital $25,000; a grain elevator "of ample capacity"; a substantial brick school, graded, with what Nicoles calls a "first class high school"; wide streets, cement sidewalks and shade trees; and — the fact Howard's entry underlines — "the town owns and successfully operates her own system of water works and also her electric light plant," a town "in some degree committed to municipal ownership" (Howard, pp. 316–317). His population figures carry their own conflict into the census article below: 1,037 by the census of 1900 in the towns entry, against the 885 his own township section sets in a 1900 sentence, with Nicoles estimating 1,500 "present" in 1907. Howard closes the entry with a flourish the town has kept: "St. Joseph county has good cause to be proud of her southwestern capital." The water works and the light plant matter beyond the portrait: they are the founding facts of a municipal-ownership course that ran through the twentieth century in Indiana's small towns, and the town's utility course at depth — what it owns and operates in 2026 — belongs to the Government and Businesses legs, with the present ownership carried in this build's note as a named gap against the town's codified ordinances. The 1907 portrait otherwise stands whole: a grain-and-railroad town of a thousand people, at the high-water mark of the railroad age, thirty years incorporated and complete in every institution a town of its size was expected to hold.