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SPN-7 DUG · CHAPMAN (1880), READ WHOLE
The Story of Walkerton section's arc — depot village to glass town to composites town — stands in the banked text; this beat anchors its first term in the only complete count of the town's business ever taken in the century: Chapman's inventory of 1880. Four dry-goods establishments; one clothing store; two hardware and implement stores; three drug stores; one large furniture store; two hotels, one of them "a very fine house" (Giberson's Florence House); groceries and restaurants; two meat shops; two saloons; two millinery stores; two printing offices; two railroad depots and one grain depot; a town hall owned by Jacob Bender; one school-house; three churches — "about 50 business men engaged here." That is the whole economy of the new town in one paragraph, twenty-three years after the plat: a farm-market village of fifty businessmen at a two-railroad crossing, before the pickle works, before the glass, before the door plant. The modern end of the beat is dug elsewhere in this wave — the Central Cut Glass works of 1910–1919 (arts addendum) and Polygon's composites plant of 1949 and its August 2026 medical expansion (people and current-today addenda) — and the Story of Walkerton section's beat prints its anchor here and points forward rather than repeating them: fifty merchants in 1880, fifty cutting frames in 1910, 1.3 million medical components a year in 2026.
Principal sources: Chapman (1880), History of St. Joseph County, Lincoln Township chapter, p. 734 (the inventory) and p. 735 (the wheat passage).