The story
Welcome to Shipshewana
Shipshewana was laid out in January 1889 beside a brand-new railroad through the Amish farms of Newbury Township, and it ‘grew like magic.’ It takes its name from the lake north-west of town and the Potawatomi chief remembered there. The trains are gone, but the auction and flea market make it one of the busiest small towns in Indiana.
Before the town there was the lake. The government surveyor of 1830 marked it only ‘Lake,’ but by 1839 a county road ran to ‘the Shipshewana Saw-mill’ in section 3, where Elijah West and a partner had dammed Shipshewana Creek in the mid-1830s. The name is that of a Potawatomi chief, Ship-she-wa-non, who signed treaties in 1828, 1832 and 1833; Jacob Piatt Dunn (1908) explained it as ‘Vision of a Lion.’ The well-known story on the town’s 1931 memorial, that the chief was removed in 1838, came home and died by the lake in 1841, has not been found in any earlier source, and in 1841 a chief of the name, of the St. Joseph band, was signing his band’s petitions in Kansas. Ford (1920) wrote only that the chief was ‘said to be buried around the lake at some now unknown spot.’
The farms around the lake were first settled in the 1830s, and from 1844 on Amish families from Somerset County, Pennsylvania, and later Holmes County, Ohio, bought most of the township. For half a century Newbury had no railroad; three lines were surveyed and failed. Then a line from Goshen to Sturgis, nicknamed the Pumpkin Vine, was finished through the north part of the township in December 1888, and Hezekiah Davis, a son of the pioneer Amos Davis, recorded the plat of a town beside it on January 18, 1889. Abram Summey laid out the west side, and old-timers remembered the two halves as Davistown and Summeytown.
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‘It grew like magic,’ Ford wrote. Brick buildings went up on every hand: a bank, a hotel, a public hall and a Methodist church. The 1893 atlas pictured the Davis bank building and hotel and counted ‘over 500’ people. The railroad passed to the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern, and robbers twice escaped from the Shipshewana bank on a railroad handcar, in 1897 and 1906. A second line, the St. Joseph Valley, ran east to LaGrange from about 1905. A fire in August 1890 destroyed the Methodist church and the Summey block.
By 1920 Shipshewana had about 600 people, the Farmers State Bank, a newspaper called the Chronicle, the Farver Lumber Company’s planing and sawmill, a grist mill and elevator, Methodist and Congregational churches and an Odd Fellows lodge. Its two-story brick school dated from 1893. The town was incorporated on April 18, 1916, with Merrill F. Hunn as first chairman of the trustees. Electric light came from C. B. Spreuer’s private plant. A summer resort with cottages and bath houses had grown up on Shipshewana Lake.
Passenger trains ended by 1931 and the last trains ran in 1980; the roadbed is now the Pumpkinvine Nature Trail. The farm sale George Curtis started in 1922 grew into the Shipshewana auction and flea market, and Amish and Mennonite life is explained for visitors at Menno-Hof. The 2020 census counted 839 people.
