The story
Welcome to Nappanee
Nappanee began in 1874 as a station on the new Chicago line of the Baltimore & Ohio, laid out in the woods where the water on one side of Market Street ran to the Great Lakes and on the other to the Gulf. Its sawmills became the Coppes kitchen-cabinet works, and its old Amish farm is now a museum.
Before there was a Nappanee there was Locke, a village two and a half miles to the northwest, laid out in 1867. When the Baltimore & Ohio built its Chicago division across the south edge of Locke Township in 1873 and 1874, it passed Locke by. Chapman (1881) says Nappanee was laid out in November 1874 by John Culp Jr., Henry Stahly and Daniel Metzler on section 36 of Locke Township and section 31 of Union Township, and surveyed by County Surveyor George T. Ager. Gordon N. Murray of the Nappanee News, quoted by Weaver (1916), says the town site was laid out about the middle of December 1874 and was first called Locke Station.
Murray describes the site as a “deadening” in tall timber, on the watershed, with swamp ash, willows and huckleberry bushes on the lots. J. C. Mellinger and B. F. Myers had a sawmill there in 1873, and the first station house stood at the edge of the timber, with Henry Eby as agent. C. D. Volkmann built the first dwelling in January 1875, working by a rail fire in below-zero weather, and moved his family in on February 3. Chapman lists the first store, hotel, drug store and blacksmith shop that followed, and says many people from Locke moved to the new town, some taking their houses with them.
Read the full story
The name is disputed. Murray says George Eby suggested “Napanee,” an Indian name, and that the post office department added the second p. Chapman says the name was taken from a town in Canada, spelled with one p.
The Coppes brothers, John D. and Frank, began in the Mellinger sawmill in 1873, bought the Strohm planing mill in 1879, and built up the firm Weaver calls Coppes, Zook & Mutschler, maker of flour, lumber, tables and kitchen cabinets. George Freese’s Sons brought their butter and produce business here in 1881. Nappanee was incorporated as a town in 1888 by Weaver’s account (1889 by Wikipedia’s) and as a city in 1925, and Weaver describes its municipal water works and light plant, high school (organized 1895) and many churches, beginning with the Amish Mennonites, Methodists and United Brethren.
South of town, the farm Christian Stahly bought for his son Moses in 1873 was opened to the public as Amish Acres in 1970 and is listed on the National Register as the Stahly–Nissley–Kuhns Farm. The 2020 census counted 6,913 people in Nappanee.