West York: the seat before the town, 1851

THE POST OFFICE AND THE STORE

The locality's first institution stood half a mile south of the townsite and bore another place's name: the post office designated West York was established in 1851, kept by C. W. N. Stephens — its first appointee, and still its postmaster when Chapman wrote in 1880 — at his place half a mile south of where Walkerton would be platted (Chapman, pp. 733–735). The mail came by hack on the road from La Porte to Plymouth; there were no railroads yet in the county's southwest. Stephens is the hinge figure of the town's founding, and the two records of his store do not quite agree, so both print. Chapman: "In 1854, Mr. Stephens built the first house in Walkerton, and also built the first store" — on a site then "covered with a dense thicket," with "no roads laid out" through it — while his office and his established trade remained at West York. The town's own published history tells the move instead as a removal at the platting: the town was "laid out by the railroad surveyors and the first lot was taken by C. W. N. Stephens, Walkerton's first postmaster," who "relocated his general store from nearby West York" (Town of Walkerton, "History," 2012); the same town account, quoted in Kristin L. Hoganson's The Heartland, remembers that "C. W. N. Stephens' General Store stood near the CP&C station." A store built new on the townsite in 1854, in Chapman; a store moved from West York when the lots were sold, in the town's telling; a store standing by the station, in both. The office followed the town last of all: the Walkerton post office has been in operation since 1860, by the postal-history record (Jim Forte Postal History, St. Joseph County) — the year the town's name replaced West York's on the mail, four years after the plat and nine after the office opened. The postal dates at archive strength are this build's note's named gap; the sequence itself — office 1851 at West York, office under the town's name from 1860 — is what the record reached supports.