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ITEM 1 · 1917–1918 · THE COUNTY MACHINERY THE TOWN ANSWERED THROUGH
Walkerton's mobilization ran through the county's machinery, because that is how Indiana built it: a state Council of Defense under the governor, a council in every county, and draft boards seated by county — and the town's young men registered, were classified, and were called through St. Joseph County's board in South Bend. The sequence at the grain the record keeps: war in April 1917; the first registration of June 5, 1917, taking the men of military age in every precinct of the county, Lincoln Township's included; the county Council of Defense organizing the home-front work — the loans, the food and fuel campaigns, the loyalty watch — under the state council's direction; and the draft's later registrations and calls through 1918, administered from the county seat. No town-level mobilization record — a Walkerton council roster, a township quota table, a registration-day scene — stands in any source this run reached, and the branch does not dress the county frame in town costume: what is documented is the machinery and the town's place inside it, and Wars & Military Service's own home-front traces (service cards sought, a service flag tested, the honor roll) are the town's surviving furniture from inside that machinery. The residue — the Independent's 1917–18 file, where the town's registration days, quotas, and council work would stand at town grain — is named as this item's settler in the run note: the course exists in the record; this seat reached its frame and its county counts, not its town columns.
Principal sources: the Indiana Council of Defense and county draft-board structure (state war record); Wars & Military Service (the Gold Star article and its home-front tests); the Independent's 1917–18 file named as the town-grain settler, not reached in this run.