The railroad that made Shipshewana

Shipshewana, Ind. On the night of Tuesday, 2 November 1897, somebody broke into the Lake Shore railroad’s tool house at Sturgis, Michigan, and wheeled out a handcar. Sometime after one in the morning the night agent at the Shipshewana depot, twelve miles down the line, thought he heard a handcar on the track. A little later he saw three men sneaking around the station.

In the morning the cashier, Hewlett Davis, came to open the family bank and found the front doors sprung and the safe blown apart with dynamite. Thousands of dollars in cash were gone, with a bundle of notes and papers. The handcar turned up in the Little Elkhart River near Middlebury, where the robbers had pumped it on down the line and tipped it in. Bloodhounds were brought in. It took ten months for Chicago detectives to arrest a man they charged with the job.

It was a railroad robbery in a railroad town. Ten years earlier there had been no bank, no depot and no town, only farms around a lake. The tracks those robbers rode had made everything they stole.

A railroad to St. Louis that stopped at Goshen

The plan was enormous. A line would run from Bay City, Michigan, south through Battle Creek and Sturgis, across northern Indiana to Goshen, and on toward the Indiana coal fields and St. Louis. Documented On 21 April 1887 the Goshen correspondent of the Indianapolis Sentinel reported that grading of the “Michigan, Indiana and St. Louis Railroad” had begun at Sturgis that day, and that the company promised “to have trains running by the 1st of November.” Goshen went wild: “Real estate has advanced 50 per cent. within the last ten days.” Documented

“Real estate has advanced 50 per cent. within the last ten days.”

The trains did not run by the first of November. That month the Michigan and Indiana companies were merged as the Canada and St. Louis, incorporated at Goshen, and the building took another year. Documented The first passenger train left Goshen for Middlebury on 5 November 1888, and in that first month, the trail’s historians report, more than 1,900 passengers rode it. In December 1888 the track was finished all the way to Sturgis. Documented Regular service over the line began on 20 December 1888, by one railroad historian’s account, and through trains to Battle Creek began on the last day of the year. Documented

Who built it? The “prime mover,” the Chicago Tribune said in 1890, was Milton Mercer, a Goshen ex-banker. The first directors were Mercer, E. D. Chipman and W. L. Stonex of Goshen and Jonathan S. Mather of Middlebury; in August 1888 control passed to J. J. Burns of Battle Creek, the contractor, and his associates. Documented The towns along the way helped pay for it. Goshen had a $25,000 subsidy pending in June 1888, and on Saturday, 22 September, Middlebury Township voted $10,000 “to secure the construction of the Canada and St. Louis railway through that vicinity.” Documented

It was never a straight road. It swung around farms and wetlands so often that people called it the Pumpkin Vine. Documented And it never got anywhere near St. Louis.

A town on a cornfield

Shipshewana did not grow up around the railroad. It was laid out for it. On 18 January 1889, a month after the track was finished, Hezekiah Davis recorded the plat of a new town on his land beside the line. Abram Summey filed the first addition that April, and more additions followed in 1890 and 1891. Documented

Did Davis pay for it? The county atlas of 1893 says only that he “did much to bring the Canada and St. Louis railroad to his neighborhood, having faith in the town then unborn.” Documented A marker put up in 2000 says he paid $10,000 to bring the railroad. We have found no record of that payment; the only $10,000 in the record of 1888 is Middlebury Township’s vote. Open

The new town had its station from the start. In June 1889 the State Board of Equalization assessed the railroad’s buildings at Shipshewana: a depot at $400, a water tank at $400 and a stock pen at $50. Documented It is the earliest record of the depot we have found. New finding Twenty years later the state still assessed a “passenger and freight house” at Shipshewana at $400, with a water tank, a windmill and a hand-car house. Documented The first train at Shipshewana to make the papers came to grief: on 3 May 1889 passenger train No. 6 was derailed at the station by an open switch, and its engineer was badly hurt. Documented

The county atlas of 1893 put it simply: “The town grew as by magic after the completion of the railroad.” It was “ten to eighteen miles from any other considerable town,” surrounded by rich farms. Within four years it had brick business blocks, the Summey block on the west side of the street, a Methodist church, a mill run by the Hawks Manufacturing Company of Goshen and the planing mill of the Farver brothers, and “a population of over 500.” It was, the atlas said, “an important shipping point for lumber, live stock and grain.” Documented

“The town grew as by magic after the completion of the railroad.”

It was really two towns. Davis owned the east side and the Summeys the west, and people called them Davistown and Summeytown. Between them, George Curtis remembered, ran a 150-foot strip called “No Man’s Land,” which was not sold off in lots until Davis’s estate was settled. Curtis, who later founded the Shipshewana auction, also remembered a big band-saw mill with a railroad switch running back to it, the town park “stacked full of lumber before the mill burned in 1901,” and four Lake Shore passenger trains and two freights a day. Documented

At the center of it stood the Davises. Their three-story brick Davis Hall held the Bank of Shipshewana, which Hezekiah had opened in 1890; the brick Hotel Davis stood opposite. Documented Hezekiah died in 1891, and by 1893 the bank’s president was his widow, Sarah R. Davis, with Francis H. Halbert as cashier. Documented

Bankrupt before its first birthday

The town boomed. The railroad company did not. On 11 March 1889, less than three months after the last rail went down, the Farmers’ Loan and Trust Company of New York sued in the federal court at Detroit, saying the company had not paid the interest on its construction bonds. The court put the road, from Goshen through Sturgis to Battle Creek, in the hands of a receiver, W. K. Ackerman of Chicago. Documented In Indiana the trade press named Thomas A. Starr receiver of the Canada and St. Louis, with J. J. Burns as general manager. Documented

On 10 July 1889 Judge Van Fleet of the circuit court at Goshen ordered the Canada and St. Louis sold. The sale was to bring no less than $9,000 a mile, and the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern was named as a likely buyer. Documented The Railroad Gazette put the floor at $225,000, with Starr as commissioner to sell it; the two figures do not agree. Open In August it went, at a foreclosure sale, to a new company, the Sturgis, Goshen and St. Louis. Documented The Lake Shore stood behind it. From 1 December 1889 it ran the line from Goshen to the junction near Sturgis, 35.81 miles, as the Sturgis, Goshen and St. Louis, by owning its stock and taking on its bonds. Documented

For the new town, it was the best possible ending. A bankrupt short line might have stopped running. Instead Shipshewana found itself on a branch of one of the great railroads of the Midwest, the Lake Shore, with connections to Chicago and the East. Reading The bankruptcy and the forced sale are missing from the town’s and the trail’s published histories, which go straight from the building of the line to the Lake Shore. New finding

The night of the handcar

Which brings us back to November 1897. The night agent heard the handcar; the robbers, the papers decided, had come in from Sturgis on the stolen car at about half past one, blown the safe and gone on down the line toward Middlebury, where they tipped the car into the Little Elkhart River. One wire report put the cash at $10,000 in currency, with valuable papers besides; the county’s 1982 history says $4,000. Documented Within weeks one of the gang, Collins Louchins, had confessed, and the circuit judge issued bench warrants for three more men, and by the last day of the year a farmer twelve miles west of town had dug up the stolen deeds, mortgages and notes: “Buried about two feet he found the tin box containing the papers, which were nearly all intact.” Documented

The Davis brothers offered a large reward. In September 1898 Chicago detectives arrested a man with at least four names, Monaghan, Morrissey, Keeley and Murphy, known as “Big Head,” whose real name was said to be Sharlan or Sharbau, and charged him with the Shipshewana job; a Fort Wayne paper named him Thomas Sharlau, alias Kelly. Documented

It happened again. At half past one in the morning of 24 October 1906, six masked men raided the village. Three tied the liveryman, Eash, to a chair in his barn and bound two farmers who were putting up their horses; the others dynamited the bank vault. The safe held, and they got very little. They escaped, a Washington paper reported, “on a handcar toward” Goshen. Documented

On 29 November 1921 the Farmers State Bank was robbed again, and a wire story printed that December called it “the ninth time the bank has been robbed in 20 years and the third time this year.” This time the thieves had cut the safe with an acetylene torch, taken some $15,000 in cash and Liberty bonds, and driven off in an automobile. Documented The county history of 1920 counts only four robberies and a fire: November 1897; “1905,” perhaps the raid of 1906; June 1916, when postage stamps were taken; and 26 August 1919, when the thieves ruined the safe but got only War Savings Stamps. Documented The United Press story of 27 August said “nothing was taken” and put the damage at $300. Documented Counting the two earlier robberies of 1921 that the wire story implies, the record would hold seven, or eight if the “1905” robbery was not the raid of 1906. Open Either way, the getaway had changed: in 1897 and 1906 the robbers left on the rails, and in 1921 they left by road. New finding

The second railroad

For a few years Shipshewana had two railroads. In 1904 crews began grading a new line between LaGrange and Shipshewana, and on 31 March 1905 passenger service began between the two towns. Documented At Shipshewana it had no depot at first, only a small wooden shelter at Main and Morton streets. Documented In April 1916, on a complaint from a resident, the state’s Public Service Commission ordered the company to submit plans for a station building at Shipshewana, and approved them that May. Documented Whether the station was ever built, with the road two years from its end, we have not found. Open It was the St. Joseph Valley Railway, the project of Herbert E. Bucklen of Elkhart, who had made a fortune selling Bucklen’s Arnica Salve; railroad historians called it the “Arnica Salve Railroad.” Documented

Bucklen dreamed of linking the electric lines of Chicago and Toledo. His road reached Elkhart in the west by 1911 and Columbia, Ohio, in the east by 1915, about seventy miles in all. Documented Local historians say it ran on three kinds of power at once, and the record bears them out. Its first car, put in service between LaGrange and Middlebury in 1905, was a gasoline-electric: “a four-cylinder gasolene engine of the marine type” turned a generator that fed four electric motors, with a storage battery besides. Documented The line from Elkhart to Bristol, opened in 1910, ran under trolley wire, and when the road was sold off in 1918 the list included three steam locomotives, Fairbanks-Morse gasoline engines and ten miles of copper trolley wire. Documented

It never paid. Bucklen died in January 1917; that December the road went into receivership, and on 11 April 1918 all service through Shipshewana ended. The track west of LaGrange, through Shipshewana, “was torn up and sold to Chicago junk firms.” A new company saved nine miles east of LaGrange. Documented Shipshewana was a one-railroad town again.

Shipshewana on the clerks’ map

The mail came by train, sorted on board by railway mail clerks who had to know every stop by heart. In 1897 one of them drew a map of Indiana to study by, with a little picture at the towns: a fish for Fish Lake, a heart and arrow for Valentine, a portrait of Sir Walter Scott for Scott. At Shipshewana he drew a sailing ship. Documented For a clerk on the night mail, the ship was a reminder of how to say the name. Reading

The long goodbye

The Lake Shore became part of the New York Central in 1914. Documented The trains kept running, but the roads were getting better every year. By the trail’s historians’ account the mail stopped riding the branch by 1928 and passenger service ended by 1931; by 1928, a railroad historian wrote, the passengers had only one mixed train a day, except Sunday. Documented By 1952 the railroads’ Official Guide listed Shipshewana as a station “for freight only.” Documented Freight kept the line alive: lumber, grain, livestock, coal and fertilizer.

In 1960 the track north of Shipshewana, to Sturgis, was abandoned, and Shipshewana became the end of the line. Documented The New York Central merged into the Penn Central in 1968, and in 1974, the county’s history records, the bankrupt Penn Central gave up the branch. Documented In 1973 the branch saw fifty round trips a year, and Shipshewana shipped 275 carloads. Documented In April 1975 the Penn Central stopped running over it because the track was unsafe, and in December 1976 service still had not resumed. Documented A federal subsidy was promised in 1976, but the trains did not come back until June 1979, when the State of Indiana leased the line and a short-line operator, the Indiana Interstate Railway, started freight again. New finding In the summer of 1980 a restored steam engine pulled excursion cars between Middlebury and Shipshewana on Sundays. Documented

It was not enough. The operators said they could no longer bear the cost, and the last trains ran on 30 November 1980. The federal order that let the Indiana Interstate run expired at 11:59 that night. The rails were pulled up in 1982. Documented That year, the county history counted what was left: LaGrange County’s 79 miles of railroad had shrunk to twenty-one and a half. Documented

From rails to trail

Then the Pumpkin Vine got a second life. In 1989 a group of cyclists proposed turning the old roadbed into a trail. Many neighbors were against it, and local governments were cool. The Friends of the Pumpkinvine Nature Trail raised $60,000, borrowed the rest, and on 22 December 1993 bought the corridor from the Penn Central for $100,000. Documented

The first mile and a half of trail opened on 2 March 2000. The Shipshewana to Middlebury section was finished in 2012, the last half-mile in Middlebury in September 2023, and in June 2024 the Friends drove a golden spike to celebrate the finished trail, about seventeen miles from Goshen to Shipshewana. Documented The trail ends where the trains did, on Depot Street.

The line, year by year

• 1887 Grading begins at Sturgis, 21 April; trains promised by 1 November. The Canada & St. Louis is formed in November.
• 1888 Middlebury Township votes $10,000, 22 September; first passenger train, Goshen to Middlebury, 5 November; track finished to Sturgis, and service begins, in December.
• 1889 Town plat recorded, 18 January; receivership, March; a train derailed at Shipshewana, 3 May; depot assessed, June; sale ordered, July; the Lake Shore takes over, 1 December.
• 1893 “The town grew as by magic”: over 500 people.
• 1897 Robbers ride a stolen handcar to the Bank of Shipshewana.
• 1905 The St. Joseph Valley line opens to LaGrange, 31 March, with a gasoline-electric car.
• 1906 Six masked men raid the bank and flee by handcar.
• 1914 The Lake Shore becomes part of the New York Central.
• 1917 Bucklen dies, January; the St. Joseph Valley line goes into receivership, December.
• 1918 All St. Joseph Valley service through Shipshewana ends, 11 April; its track west of LaGrange is sold for junk.
• 1921 Bank robbers arrive and leave by automobile, 29 November.
• 1931 Passenger service has ended.
• 21 years later
• 1952 Shipshewana a station “for freight only.”
• 1960 Track north to Sturgis abandoned.
• 15 years later
• 1975 Penn Central stops running to Shipshewana, April.
• 1979 The Indiana Interstate Railway brings freight back, June.
• 1980 Steam excursions in summer; the last trains, 30 November.
• 1982 The rails are pulled up.
• 1993 The Friends buy the corridor, 22 December.
• 31 years later
• 2024 The golden spike: the trail is finished.

Why it matters

Most towns in the valley grew slowly around a mill, a crossroads or a county seat. Shipshewana was different: it was made, almost overnight, by a railroad that was itself bankrupt within months. For ninety years the trains brought it everything, from customers to bank robbers. When they stopped, the town did not die. Part 3 tells what it found to take their place.

The case file: what we asked, and what we found

1. The three kinds of power. Answered: the 1905 trade press describes the gasoline-electric car, and the 1918 sale list names steam locomotives, gasoline engines and trolley wire. Documented

The whole series as one PDF ›

To cite this page: Michael Urbanski, “The railroad that made Shipshewana,” Project Scroll, first published 27 October 2026, https://projectscroll.com/news/the-railroad-that-made-shipshewana/. To cite a single finding, use its own link on our Discoveries page. Part 2 of a series; part 1 is The Shipshewana Puzzle: One Name, at Least Five People Corrections are welcome, and any we make are noted on this page.