Two plats, three railroads, one town

THE GEOGRAPHIC PREMISE

Walkerton stands at the county's southwest corner, on the first dry ground east of the Kankakee marsh: the federal geographic-names record (GNIS feature 2397718) fixes the town at 41.46583 degrees north, 86.48250 degrees west, at 725 feet of elevation; its civil identifiers are FIPS place code 18-79694 and ZIP code 46574, and its area is 1.90 square miles, all land, in the 2020 Gazetteer vintage — against 1.96 square miles returned by the 2010 census, the difference a measurement vintage, not a boundary change this record shows. The town is a composite: two plats of the 1850s, West Troy and Walkerton, and a run of additions, "united under one name and one government," as Howard puts it — "Except the cities of South Bend and Mishawaka, it is the largest and most important municipal corporation in St. Joseph county" (Howard, pp. 316–317). Its plats sit in sections 23 and 24 of township 35 north, range 1 west, near the center of Lincoln Township; the Kankakee River runs along the township's western and southern rim a few miles off, and the marsh that made the township's land both rich and late lies beyond it. The ground before the town — the marsh, the river, the treaty that took the ground and the survey that gridded it — is carried in Before the City; the Story of Walkerton section begins with the settlement.