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MAJ-7 (FIRE HALF) DUG · THE PRESS RECORD AS COMPILED BY THE SOCIETY
Walkerton's disaster history is a fire history: the town's catastrophe register runs through its fire department's calls, and this section's reads fill three of its frames. The first is the July 1913 explosion's second act — fires in thirteen places at once, fought by the town's own department with South Bend's department rolling to aid, the mutual-aid pattern of the region already working in 1913. The second is the fire that ended the town's signature industry: on February 19, 1919 the Central Cut Glass works burned from a first-floor salesroom fire spotted from the railway tower about one o'clock, origin unknown — arson suspected and unproven, a short circuit or a smoldering cigar guessed — with the bitter circumstance the Independent recorded, that the electric current had been cut three or four miles out of town and the water pumps stood useless; the building was gutted to its bare walls and never rebuilt. The third frame is a building saved from the unknown: the opera-house question the audit carried as GAP-W-ART-1 is answered at attestation strength in this section — Hudelmyer's opera house stands in the March 1910 record hosting the glass company's founding meeting — and its own fire fate, with the depots' (GAP-W-TRN-4), waits on the Sanborn fire-insurance run (DF-W-69), which is named here as the set's settler for the building-level register. The opera house matter is carried whole in the arts addendum; it is printed here at pointer size to close the fire set's frame.
Principal sources: the Walkerton Independent via Sherland (2012) and the WAHS Central Cut Glass exhibit (1913 and 1919, read whole).