The story
Welcome to Ligonier
Ligonier was platted on the Elkhart River in 1835 and grew quickly once the Northern Indiana Railroad came through in the 1850s. Jewish merchants from Germany helped make it a busy market town, and their temple of 1889 still stands on Main Street.
Isaac Cavin, who came from Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, in 1830, laid out Ligonier in May 1835 on land he had entered at the Fort Wayne land office, the year before Noble County was organized; the plat was recorded at the seat of LaGrange County. Settlers found the site covered with wild strawberries, and the Elkhart River, then much larger, wound through it. Isaac Spencer, the first county clerk, opened a store in a small log building, and Ward Bradford built the first house about 1836. Nearby, Simpson Cummins laid out the rival village of Rochester in November 1836, with an iron works fed by ore hauled from Ore Prairie; Ligonier’s growth eventually emptied it.
In 1840 only two or three families lived in Ligonier. The post office came in 1848, carrying on the Good Hope office, the first in the county. When it became certain in 1852 that the Northern Indiana Railroad would pass through, the town began to grow, and within five years its population and business had quadrupled; many of the newcomers were Jewish merchants. Myers & Strous, dealers in clothing and dry goods, began business about 1854. Ligonier was incorporated as a town in 1864. It became a great wheat market: 31,180 bushels were shipped in August and September 1860, and by 1882 nearly 500,000 bushels went out each year.
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In 1867 Ligonier’s Jewish families organized a congregation in the Hostetter building, with Mathias Straus as president, Isaac Ackerman, Jonas Decker, H. B. Faulk, Solomon Mier, Leopold Schloss and F. M. Straus as officers and trustees, and in September of that year they put up a small synagogue; Jacob Straus gave a Bible valued at $200. The congregation took the name Ahavath Sholom. Two of the town’s banks grew out of these families’ firms: the Straus Brothers’ bank, which became the Citizens Bank, and Solomon Mier’s, later the Mier State Bank.
In 1889 the congregation dedicated a new temple, with Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, founder of American Reform Judaism, speaking on religious tolerance. The state marker notes that the Jewish community and its neighbors shared pulpits and meeting places over the years, and that the Jewish population peaked around 1900 and then declined as younger people left for larger cities. The congregation later gave its whole library to the Ligonier Public Library, a Carnegie building finished in October 1908. In 1989 the Ligonier Public Library bought the temple, and for some thirty years it was the Ligonier Historical Society’s museum. In 2019 the library sold it, and it is now a private home, its architecture protected by a preservation easement held by Indiana Landmarks.
Ligonier became a city in 1892. Its mills, refrigerator and carriage works were joined by the Lyon & Greenleaf flour mill, which by 1920 turned out about a thousand barrels a day. The 2020 census counted 4,568 people in Ligonier.
