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THE DOCKET, WHOLE — AND CHAPMAN'S SHORTER TELLING BESIDE IT
Walkerton's incorporation is not a missing date, as its sister Osceola's is — it is a four-year docket, and Howard prints the whole of it from the county record: "After several fruitless attempts, Walkerton became an incorporated town June 8, 1877." The first petition was filed with the county auditor on 2 December 1873 and an election ordered for 22 December — but the commissioners refused their approval because of irregularities in the proceedings. A second petition was filed on 8 March 1876 and an election ordered for 3 April 1876 — and no further proceedings appear. A third petition was filed on 5 March 1877 and the election ordered for 2 April; the report of the proceedings was returned to the board on 8 June 1877, the board "found everything regular and entered an order of incorporation," and from that day the town has been a municipality (Howard, pp. 316–317). Chapman, writing three years after the event, prints the looser telling: "In 1876 Walkerton was incorporated. The petitions were presented in 1874, but by some mistake were not received until 1876" (Chapman, pp. 733–735). The two accounts are printed together and not reconciled: Chapman compresses three petitions and four years into one mistaken filing and a year that is not the docket's; Howard's course of the record — petition, election ordered, refusal, silence, petition, election, order — governs the date, 8 June 1877, and Chapman's stands as the earlier, nearer, and wrong-in-part telling the town first heard of itself. What followed the order — the first town board, the succession of councils and clerk-treasurers from 1877 to the present holders — is the Government leg's record, pursued from the town's own books; the online record reached carries the structure, printed in the succession article below, and the succession of names stands as a named gap in this build's note. The order itself, though, is settled: Walkerton is a town of 1877, incorporated on the third attempt.