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No banked fragment dates a surface on any Walkerton road.
The frame. Indiana's road surfaces changed by statute before they changed by township. The state's own highway history (INDOT's published history of its predecessor commission) fixes the mechanism: legislation encouraging private companies to build macadamized or gravel roads was passed in 1852; counties were authorized to construct roads with taxes on roadside property beginning in 1877 — the gravel-road era's legal engine, under which Indiana's township and county gravel roads, the standard improved surface of the late nineteenth century, were in fact built. The state era then arrived in two acts, exactly as the register's item frames them: the Indiana General Assembly first created a State Highway Commission in March 1917, the act's constitutionality was challenged, and by the time the Indiana Supreme Court upheld the 1917 act in January 1919 the legislature had repealed it and replaced it with the act that became law on 10 March 1919; the present state highway system began with the commission the 1919 act created, and its first construction letting followed on 15 July 1919 — a letting whose project list is itself a measure of where the state's first money went: Federal Aid Project No. 2 was in this county, 4.68 miles of the Niles Road at $192,359.20, in bituminous concrete. Plank, the first term of the register's succession, belongs in Indiana chiefly to the chartered plank-road companies of the late 1840s and 1850s; no plank-road charter, company or planked reach on the La Porte–Plymouth road or any Lincoln Township road appears in any record reached for this section, and the plank term prints here as a tested absence, not a stage this ground is shown to have passed through.
The local application, at its true size. That Lincoln Township's roads passed from dirt to gravel under the county system, and that the town's numbered corridors were hard-surfaced under the state system, is the certain shape of the thing — the banked Spine leg already carries its one dated paving-side fact for the corridor itself: the second State Road 6, US 6's predecessor through Walkerton, was under construction in 1928 expressly to relieve the Lincoln Highway, and a state road under construction in 1928 was a road being built to a hard surface. But no source reached for this section dates the graveling of the founding road, the first hard surface inside the town, or the paving year of any named Walkerton street. The succession therefore prints as a frame with its local dates open: dirt under the hack road (to 1855 and beyond); the gravel era available to the county from 1877 and general across Indiana's county roads in the decades after; the state takeover of the through corridors under the 1919 system; construction on the town's own US 6 line by 1928; and the present paved state, which no one needs a source to see but which this build does not backdate by a single year.
Closure: MIXED — the state frame DUG and dated (1852, 1877, 1917, 1919, the 1919 letting, 1928); the plank stage a tested absence; every Walkerton-local surface date a NAMED GAP. Settlers: the Indiana State Highway Commission's early reports and project records for the corridor contracts, and the Walkerton Independent run in Hoosier State Chronicles for the town's own graveling and paving notices.
Sources: Indiana Department of Transportation, INDOT History (the 1852 macadam/gravel legislation; the 1877 county road-tax authorization; the March 1917 act, its challenge and January 1919 ruling; the 10 March 1919 act; the first letting of 15 July 1919, including F.A. No. 2, St. Joseph County, Niles Road), read for this section; the Story of Walkerton section leg of this build (State Road 6 under construction, 1928).