The story
Welcome to Middlebury
Middlebury lies at the foot of the hills along the Little Elkhart, its main street the old road from Logansport to White Pigeon. Deahl in 1905 thought it had the charm of an English village; today it is a gateway to the county’s Amish country and the Pumpkinvine trail.
Enoch Woodbridge and his family, from Vermont, settled in the township in 1832, and Solomon L. Hixon arrived on March 4, 1834, by Chapman’s account (1881), locating on the northeast quarter of section 10. Others named by Deahl (1905) include Thomas Evans, Cornelius Northrup, Dr. Cephas Dunning, the first physician, Orange Walker, Samuel Reynolds and Harvey Corpe. The Woodbridges built a sawmill in the spring of 1834.
The village was platted by Winslow, Warren and Brown, a syndicate that, Deahl says, took the plat to New York and sold fifty-foot lots for a hundred dollars each. Chapman dates the platting to 1835; Deahl and Weaver say about 1836, and the Goshen Express of March 1837 said it had been laid out “last fall.” W. T. Hunter’s inn of 1835 was the first building. George Sayer and John C. Case kept the first stores, Cornelius Northrup built a flour and sawmill on the river, Benjamin G. Evans was the first postmaster, and the Methodists, led by Rev. Ira Woodworth, worshipped first in a schoolhouse built in 1836.
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Middlebury was incorporated as a town in 1868, with Watson Hutchinson as chairman of the first board. For years its railroad station was at Vistula, to the north on the Lake Shore line; the branch railroad reached Middlebury in 1889, by Deahl’s and Weaver’s account. Joel P. Heatwole founded the Middlebury Record in 1877 or 1878, and the brick schoolhouse of 1857 served until the high school Weaver pictured in 1916.
The town’s best-known landmark is a garden. Vernon H. Krider founded his nursery here in 1896, and after the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair part of its prize-winning exhibit was moved to a 2.4-acre plot in Middlebury, now the Krider World’s Fair Garden. The 2020 census counted 3,466 people in Middlebury.