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WEST TROY, WALKERTON, AND WHO WALKER WAS
The town was platted twice in nineteen months, by two proprietors, at the two ends of one railroad crossing — and the two county histories do not tell even that the same way: Howard, writing from the plat record, gives the instruments: West Troy was platted on 14 December 1854 by Elias D. Jones, on the southeast part of the northeast quarter of section 23, township 35 north, range 1 west; and Walkerton was platted on 20 June 1856 by William C. Hannah, on the southwest quarter of section 24, in the same township and range (Howard, pp. 316–317). Chapman, a generation earlier and looser, writes that Walkerton was "laid out in March, 1857, by one Mr. Allen," and West Troy "laid out in 1855" (Chapman, pp. 733–735). The conflict prints whole: Howard's account names the proprietor and the day for each plat and follows the record the county kept; Chapman's names a Mr. Allen whom Howard's record does not show, and dates neither plat as Howard does. The modern reference line ("Walkerton was platted in 1856") follows Howard. The plats were a railroad's work in either telling: the road then building south from La Porte toward Plymouth crossed the townsite north to south, and the town history's account — again as Hoganson quotes it — says the town "was planned by surveyors for the railroad; its track went straight, north and south," its streets "laid out on the strictest of grids, every turn a right angle," with streets "named Michigan, Virginia, and Georgia." West Troy stood at the junction-to-be, where the east–west Baltimore & Ohio would later cross; Walkerton stood beside the first road's depot ground. The additions that stitched them into one town followed on the record Howard prints: Burk's addition to West Troy, 27 April 1860; Jacob Rupel's first three additions, recorded 11 December 1868, his fourth on 2 July 1875 and his fifth on 23 January 1884; and Dixon W. Place's first addition, 3 September 1887 (Howard, pp. 316–317). Chapman's county area table gives the incorporated footprint as it stood in 1880: the town of Walkerton, 135 acres, inside a township of 13,395 (Chapman, area table).
The name carries the same split, one level deeper: Howard states it as settled — the town was "named from John Walker, the promoter of a railroad through the town, from Plymouth to Laporte, known at first as the Indianapolis, Peru & Chicago railroad, but long since become a part of the Lake Erie & Western system," the road the country nicknamed, in its feeble early years, the "Pe-wee road" (Howard, pp. 316–317). The town's own published history states it otherwise, in the sentence Hoganson quotes from it: "Walkerton was named for James H. Walker, a banker who in the middle of the 19th century helped build the Cincinnati, Peru, and Chicago Railroad. The CP&C ran through Walkerton." John Walker the promoter of the Indianapolis, Peru & Chicago, in the county history; James H. Walker the banker of the Cincinnati, Peru & Chicago, in the town's. The corporate record shows why both names were available to be remembered: the road through Walkerton was built in pieces that carried both. The Cincinnati, Peru & Chicago Railway was chartered on 2 June 1853 (Report of the Secretary of the Treasury on the State of the Finances, 1856, railroad table), and it built the line south from La Porte that ended at Plymouth in 1855 — the reach that runs through Walkerton. A contemporary newspaper account of the consolidated company, the Logansport Pharos Tribune of 26 May 1881, states the Indianapolis, Peru & Chicago's makeup plainly: it was "a consolidation [of] the old Peru and Indianapolis [of] seventy five Miles, the Cincinnati Peru and Chicago [of] seventy five Miles, [and] the La Porte and Lake Michigan [of] thirteen Miles." The Peru & Indianapolis end of the chain had been reorganized in 1864 as the Indianapolis, Peru & Chicago Railway, with a 159-mile main line; the consolidated road was sold to the Lake Erie & Western in 1887, passed to the New York, Chicago & St. Louis — the Nickel Plate — in 1922, and ran thereafter in the succession this build prints for the town's north–south rails: Norfolk & Western from 1964, Norfolk Southern from 1982. Chapman, writing in 1880, dates the road's construction through the town to 1856 (pp. 733–735) — the year of the Walkerton plat in Howard — against the 1855 completion of the La Porte–Plymouth reach in the railroad record; the two datings print together, construction seasons on adjoining reaches of one building road. What the record does not settle is the man: whether the town's Walker was Howard's John, a promoter, or the town history's James H., a banker of the CP&C, no source reached decides, and the question stands as a named gap in this build's note, with the railroad's corporate papers as its settler. The name conflict is printed, not resolved.