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ITEMS 1, 2, 7 AND 11 · THE QUESTION TESTED FIRST AND PRINTED AS THE FINDING
The register's rule for this section is that the boundary sentence is the headline: no farm tractor was ever built in Walkerton — and the sentence is printed here as a tested finding, not an apology. The test was run across the tractor marque registers and encyclopedias, the county histories, and the town's full directory canvasses: no tractor works, no tractor marque, no tractor model run, and no tractor assembly of any date stands at a Walkerton address. The region's tractor history belongs to its makers' cities and prints here at boundary size only, as ordered: Oliver's works and course are South Bend's (with the marque's later life in Charles City), Rumely's are La Porte's, and the garden-tractor trade's famous seat — Wheel Horse — is South Bend's again. The same-brand attribution trap the checklist warns of (the post-merger model wearing the acquiring brand) cannot arise on this ground, there being no model to attribute; and the works the town did have — implement dealers' shops, wagon works, the glass and food and composites factories — stand in their own files at their own strengths, none of them a tractor plant in disguise. The headline holds for every year of the tractor age: Walkerton sold, serviced, and farmed with tractors for a century, and built none.
Principal sources: tractor marque registers and encyclopedias, checked for a Walkerton maker, November 2026; the town's directory canvasses; the Oliver, Rumely, and Wheel Horse records at boundary size.