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WEA-6 / WEA-10 MIXED · THE BANKING NAMES STANDING AS RESIDUE
The richest-man test returns no verdict, and the great-houses test returns a street, and both results are findings. On the richest man: no era of the record crowns one. The test prints exhausted at the strength reached: Walkerton's wealth was real and repeatedly renewed, and it never wore one name long enough for the record to crown it. On the great houses: the town's grandest documented residence-building of the first era is commercial — Bender's brick block with its hall — and its grandest house-building gesture of the record is the Florence House, Giberson's "very fine house" of a hotel (1875). The domestic great houses stand where the architecture addendum places them: in the 1875 atlas plates and the Sanborn run (DF-W-69), with the Stephens house of 1854 and the Frash house of 1885 as the survey's dated anchors. The residue and the settler print together; a wealth leg that invented a richest man would be fiction with footnotes.
Principal sources: Chapman (1880) and Howard (1907) for the era tests; the named settlers (Goodspeed 1893; probate; the Sanborn run) for the residue.