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WEA-1 DUG · CHAPMAN'S VALUATIONS AND THE RECORD'S SHAPE
Walkerton's wealth has run in three eras, and Chapman's sketches price the first of them to the acre. The land era: the township's fortunes of 1880 are acreage with a price on it — William Bellinger's 120 acres in section 17 carried at $75 the acre; Benjamin F. Rinehart's 220 acres; Allen Beall's 240; Neely Frame's 140 in section 13, a first-justice's farm — with Jacob Bender standing astride the transition, his wealth already urban: a fine brick store building whose upper floor was Bender's Hall, the town hall itself in his ownership in 1880, a twenty-year milling past behind him. The counter era follows: the merchants and bankers of Howard's 1907 street — fifty businessmen grown to a banked, elevator-served market town, the Walkerton State Bank capitalized at $25,000 in Howard's telling, its real fortunes banked whole in this build's banking record and ended entire in February 1930. The plant era is the third: the wealth of the glass decade (a Chicago firm's branch, its fortunes exported), then of the door and pickle years, then of the composites plant that stayed. The structure prints because it explains this section's other findings — why the town's richest-man test has no single answer (article below), and why its philanthropy, when it came, came from a plant family: in each era the town's surplus pooled in the era's form, and only the third era's form is still here to give it back.
Principal sources: Chapman (1880), Lincoln Township sketches (the acreage valuations; Bender); Howard (1907), pp. 317–318 (the $25,000 bank capital); the banked banking and businesses records of this build.