The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
The corporate and newspaper record, read first-hand in the Marshall County history of 1908, moves the year — and nearly gives the month. The road's building contract, let to French, Tyner & Co., required the line to be completed by 1 September 1855. In the history's flat words: "They failed." What 1855 holds is the deadline, not the trains. The trains come in the summer of 1856, in the papers of the day as the county history reprints them. The Logansport Times of 5 June 1856 reports: "Regular trains are now running in connection with the Logansport stage… before the Fourth of July we expect to hail our neighbors of Plymouth." The Plymouth Banner of 26 June 1856 has the track nearly completed. And the first train over the reach is named and dated: "The first train that came to Plymouth over that road was an excursion train, on the eighteenth of July, 1856" — a free excursion from La Porte to Plymouth, David Kendall conducting, assisted by Welcome Rice. By about 1 September 1856 the trains were stopping at the Fort Wayne depot, and the Plymouth–Peru reach below was not completed until 1868.
Walkerton stands on the La Porte–Plymouth reach, between the two named ends. Its first train is therefore bounded, not dated: no earlier than the regular running of June 1856, no later than the La Porte–Plymouth excursion of 18 July 1856 that had to pass through the town's ground to reach Plymouth at all. The exact Walkerton day is not in the record reached; the papers that could carry it are the La Porte and Plymouth sheets of June and July 1856 themselves. But the banked 1855 does not survive the test: the year belongs to a contract the builders failed to meet, and the road's first summer on this ground was 1856.
Sources: History of Marshall County, Indiana (1908), ch. LXIII, "Railroads" — building contract and 1 September 1855 deadline ("They failed"); Logansport Times, 5 June 1856; Plymouth Banner, 26 June 1856; first-train excursion, 18 July 1856; Fort Wayne depot stops from about 1 September 1856; Plymouth–Peru completed 1868 — read first-hand November 2026; banked line succession in Transportation.