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1835 – November 2026 · Lincoln Township and the town of Walkerton
The ground: the first settlements on this ground were made in 1835, when it lay in Liberty Township; Lincoln Township itself was formed by order of the county board on 7 June 1866, with boundaries that have remained unchanged since (Howard). Walkerton was platted on 20 June 1856 beside the older plat of West Troy (14 December 1854), and the two, with their additions, grew into one town, incorporated in 1877 on Howard's account. The frame matters because the records were kept by the jurisdictions that existed when the wars were fought: the Civil War was recorded while this was Liberty Township ground, the Spanish-American War and the First World War under Lincoln Township and the Walkerton post office, and the modern federal files by home of record — the town's name, when the man gave it, and the county alone when this section's own rules say county, as the Army's Korean War rows do.
The instruments: this section works, in order of strength, the federal casualty files (the War Department's 1946 Honor List, the Defense Casualty Analysis System extracts for Korea and Vietnam, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency's profiles), the state's Gold Star Honor Roll of 1921, the county histories (Chapman 1880, Howard 1907), and the St. Joseph County veterans index — the instrument built from the county's own burials and obituaries, whose township-and-city attributions are what let a county roll be read at town strength at all. Of that index, the letter pages H, L, M, R, S and W were read whole; the C page returned a server refusal (HTTP 403) and was not retried, and the remaining letters were not read. Every finding credited to the index below stands at that stated strength, and the whole-index sweep is named in the closing register as the settler that would raise each of them.
The boundary: St. Joseph County's rolls are large — 232 printed entries on Chapman's Civil War Roll of Honor, 109 names on the county's Gold Star roll as recounted in the Granger pass, 430 Army dead on the War Department's 1946 county figure, 43 names in the Korean War file, 54 in the Vietnam file — and South Bend's and Mishawaka's shares of them are printed here only as the frame that makes Walkerton's own figures legible. The postal area is not the town: the 46574 post office serves ground in Marshall and LaPorte counties as well, and no name is taken on a Walkerton mailing address alone.
Sources:
- Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), vol. 1, Ch. VIII §10 (Lincoln Township), Ch. IX §5 (Walkerton), Ch. XIV (Military History) — read in the book's digitized transcription.
- St. Joseph County veterans index (INGenWeb, RootsWeb) — letter pages H, L, M, R, S, W read whole; the C page refused (HTTP 403), not retried.
- The banked sister builds, for the county frames carried with their methods: Osceola Wars & Military Service (Chapman's roll counted; the Korea method limit), Granger wars file (the Gold Star recount, 109; the Korea county count, 43), Mishawaka this history (the county 430, read whole), South Bend wars file (the Vietnam 54, verified three ways).