The story
Welcome to Topeka
Topeka grew up as Slabtown, a sawmill crossroads on the Haw Patch, the richest farmland in the county. When the Wabash Railroad came through in 1893 the village was platted and given a new name borrowed from Kansas, and it is still the trading town of the Haw Patch, known for its draft-horse auctions.
The Haw Patch was a tract of some four thousand acres in the south-west of the county, in the corner where Eden and Clearspring townships meet and running into Noble County, named for the hawthorns that grew there among scattered oak and hickory. Its easily plowed soil drew the first settlers: Robert Latta and William McConnell came from Ohio in the early 1830s, and Dr. Johnston Latta settled ‘in Haw Patch (now Topeka)’ in 1841. The town’s own account dates the settlement to the spring of 1832.
Before the railroad, the crossroads on the Eden–Clearspring line was called Haw Patch Center, the Haw Patch, or most often Slabtown, for its sawmills and buildings of slab lumber; the post office was named Haw Patch. William McConnell was postmaster and kept the first store, and Timothy Hudson Jr. kept another at his house on the Clearspring side, with a sawmill and tannery. Jacob Crusen built a store about 1871 that burned two years later; John Keim rebuilt on the lot in 1877, and Thomas Trittapoo put up a larger building in 1878.
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For years there was talk of a railroad called the Canada Southern, but nothing came of it until the Wabash built its line across the south of the county. The Indiana Improvement Company platted the town on June 14, 1893, the year the railroad was built, and it was renamed Topeka. The Topeka Area Historical Society says railroad workers thought the country looked like Topeka, Kansas, and the railroad officials proposed the name. The western part of the town lies in Eden Township and the eastern part, east of Main Street, in Clearspring.
The Sycamore Literary Society, begun as a debating society about 1865, bought and rebuilt an old Dunkard church as its hall in 1879. In the new town it raised a larger hall with $4,000 from Andrew Carnegie, $4,000 from the Ligonier banker Jacob Strass and local subscriptions; it burned on April 16, 1915, and was rebuilt and dedicated that December, seating 483. Topeka was incorporated on August 13, 1913, with J. W. Priest as its first president, and built waterworks with its citizens in 1915. By 1920 it had a brick school and a concrete high school of 1914, Methodist, Baptist and Brethren churches, two Mennonite congregations just outside town, and two banks.
Topeka is still a market town for the Amish farms around it. Its livestock auction holds weekly sales and one of the largest draft-horse auctions in the world. The 2020 census counted 1,206 people.