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DECLINE-AND-REMAKING, AT THIS TOWN'S SHAPE
Walkerton's remaking was to stay the same size for seventy years, and the series dates it exactly: 2,102 in 1950; 2,044 in 1960; 2,006 in 1970; 2,051 in 1980; 2,061 in 1990; a peak of 2,274 in 2000 — the largest count in the town's record; then 2,144 in 2010 and 2,096 in 2020. No decade in seventy years moved the town by more than the wartime jump or the 2000 peak, and no decade emptied it: the grain trade thinned as trucking took the township's wheat off the rails, the belt line's rails were lifted, the passenger trains of all three roads ended — and the town remained what its junction, its schools and its industries made it, a working town of two thousand at the county's corner, inside the South Bend–Mishawaka metropolitan area on paper and a day's own place in fact. The town marked its age from the plat, not the incorporation: in July 2006 Walkerton celebrated its sesquicentennial, the 150th anniversary of the 1856 platting — the founding date the town keeps, Howard's date, against Chapman's 1857. Its schools consolidated into the John Glenn School Corporation, which operates Walkerton Elementary School, Urey Middle School and John Glenn High School in the town (2020 Census school district reference map, St. Joseph County) — the Schools section's record, named here at frame strength. Its library is the Walkerton-Lincoln Township Public Library (Indiana public library directory). In April 2015 the town stood for a week at the center of a national argument its size never seeks: the owners of Memories Pizza, the town's pizza parlor, became the first known Indiana business to announce it would not cater a gay wedding, in the days after the state's Religious Freedom Restoration Act passed; the episode, its backlash and support, and the shop's later closing are the Controversies leg's record, named here because a spine that omitted the one week the whole country said the town's name would not be the town's spine. Two of the country's notable minds began here — Harold C. Urey (1893–1981), born in Walkerton, Nobel laureate in chemistry in 1934 for the discovery of deuterium; and Walter LaFeber (b. 1933), born and raised in Walkerton, the historian of American foreign relations whose family's grocery Hoganson's portrait of the town still names — and their records are the People leg's, at pointer here.