The story
Welcome to Newbury Township
Newbury Township, on the county’s west line, is the heart of LaGrange County’s Amish country. Amish families from Pennsylvania began buying its farms in 1844, and by 1882 they held almost the whole township. The railroad town of Shipshewana grew up beside its lake in 1889.
Newbury covers surveyed Township 37 North, Range 8 East, with Van Buren to the north, Clay to the east, Eden to the south and Elkhart County to the west. The Little Elkhart River and a branch of the Pigeon drain it; Shipshewana Lake lies in the north, with Cotton and Hood lakes inside the township and Cass and Mud lakes partly so. The east part was low and marshy. The township was surveyed in 1830, and the surveyor marked Shipshewana Lake only ‘Lake.’ Ford (1920) says the Potawatomi mingled with the settlers in their hunts and sports, and that deer, bear, wild turkey and wild honey were plentiful.
Squatters from the Woodbridge family built a cabin in section 19 about 1831 and moved on before the land was sold. The first land certificate was issued to Obadiah Lawrence on July 17, 1835. Elijah West and a partner built a dam, race and sawmill on Shipshewana Creek in section 3 in the mid-1830s, the first frame building in the township, and Amos Davis, one of the leading men of the early county, came to the Woodbridge place in 1836 and built a second mill. George Lotterer laid out a paper town called Georgetown on Shipshewana Lake in 1837. Davis surveyed the Middlebury and Haw Patch and the White Pigeon and Ligonier roads in 1840 and kept the Pashan post office from 1844.
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Newbury was set off from Lima on March 6, 1837, and its first election was held on April 3, 1837, at Truman Wilkinson’s house, where by ‘inviting and imploring’ every man of voting age, with help from the hands at the Shipshewana mills, thirteen votes were cast; there were just enough offices to go around. The name, chosen that day, was borrowed from neighboring Middlebury in Elkhart County. Joseph Keasey’s farm saw a Methodist church organized in the fall of 1837, and the first schoolhouse was built in section 32 that year.
In 1844 Daniel and Joseph Miller rode out on horseback from Somerset County, Pennsylvania, stopped at Amos Davis’s and bought farms; Christian and Joseph Bontrager followed in sections 19 and 20, and John C. Yoder, called the doctor for his skill at healing, in November 1844. By 1881 the Amish held almost the whole township, in three church districts of the old order meeting in their homes, besides a New Amish church built at the Forks in 1863, a Mennonite church at Lake Shore of 1874, and a German Baptist church of 1874. The 1882 history admired their thrift, morality and care for their own poor.
For half a century the township had no railroad. When the Goshen–Sturgis line came through the north in 1888, Hezekiah Davis platted Shipshewana beside it in January 1889. The Menno Yoder polygonal barn west of Shipshewana is on the National Register of Historic Places. The 2020 census counted 5,792 people in Newbury Township.