The story
Welcome to Walkerton
Walkerton was cleared out of thickets and swamp in the 1850s where a new railroad crossed the southwest corner of the county, and was named for the man who promoted that railroad. A second line in 1873 made it a junction and a grain town, and in 1907 Howard called it the county’s “southwestern capital.”
The southwestern corner of the county was among the last to fill. Chapman (1880) says the first settlement in what became Lincoln Township was made in the fall of 1835 by Christian Fulmer and his family, with Thomas H. Wiley the next spring; the town’s own history names Christian and Anna Fulmer and their children as the first known family. Settlers came slowly until about 1850. In 1851 C. W. N. Stephens set up a post office called West York half a mile south of the later town, keeping a grocery as well, and the mail came by hack between La Porte and Plymouth.
The railroad made the town. Elias D. Jones platted West Troy on December 14, 1854, and William C. Hannah platted Walkerton on June 20, 1856, on the neighboring section, Howard (1907) says; Chapman says the town was laid out in March 1857 by “one Mr. Allen.” Howard explains that the name came from John Walker, promoter of the railroad from Plymouth to La Porte, first called the Indianapolis, Peru & Chicago and nicknamed the “Pe-wee road,” later part of the Lake Erie & Western; the town’s own history calls him John C. Walker, a state senator. Chapman recalls that the site was a dense thicket, and that storekeepers went out before breakfast to chop roads through the underbrush.
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When the Baltimore & Ohio crossed the first line at West Troy in 1873, Walkerton became a junction, and West Troy became its western part. In 1880 Chapman counted about fifty businessmen, two hotels, two printing offices and a town hall owned by Jacob Bender, and noted that about 300,000 bushels of wheat had been bought there that season. Henry S. Mintle began the Walkerton Visitor on April 7, 1875; J. F. Endly bought it in 1886 and renamed it the Walkerton Independent. The Methodists built the first church in 1859, long known as the West York Mission, followed by the Baptists in 1870, the Catholics in 1876 and the Presbyterians, organized in 1876.
After petitions failed in 1873 and 1876, the county board incorporated the town on June 8, 1877, Howard says. A third railroad, the Three I, connected Walkerton with South Bend and the Illinois coal fields. By 1907 the town owned its own waterworks and electric light plant, had cement sidewalks and a brick graded school with a high school, and Samuel J. Nicoles estimated its people at fifteen hundred. The Walkerton Area Historical Society opened its Walkerton Heritage Museum in 1997 and moved it in 2022 to its present building. The 2020 census counted 2,096 people.