The story
Welcome to Wawaka
Wawaka grew up beside the Lake Shore railroad in Elkhart Township, where Isaac Tibbot had lived since 1834 and laid out eighty lots in February 1857. For a few years a big flour mill made it one of the busy grain points of the county, until fire took the mill in 1874; the village settled at about four hundred people.
The 1882 history admits “some conflict of opinion” about who settled Elkhart Township first. Samuel Tibbot had built a dwelling there by 1832, and the Knights, a Mr. Austin and David P. Bourie came at about the same time; Austin built his cabin on the bank of the Elkhart River, and Bourie opened a log store beside it with goods worth about $1,000, worth $4,000 within three years. When two strangers looked over his unentered land in 1832, Bourie is said to have put on blanket, feathers and war paint and ridden hard for the Fort Wayne land office, hoping to pass them on the road without being known. Isaac Tibbot settled for good in 1834, and that summer he, his brother Samuel, the Knights, Thomas Pierson and others put up a round-log schoolhouse sixteen feet square, which the historian thought was probably the first building in the county raised wholly as a school; Pierson taught about twelve scholars there in the winter of 1834–35.
Before the railroad the township’s village was Springfield, later Cosperville, where Joseph Steinberger built a sawmill about 1838. At its height in 1845 it had two stores, a saloon, a gristmill, a sawmill, a church, a schoolhouse and fifteen or more families; after that, the 1882 history wrote, it “remained but the ghost of its former fame.” John Zimmerman ran a tannery a short distance north of the future Wawaka from 1842 to 1869.
Read the full story
“Wawaka owes its life and existence to the Lake Shore Railway,” the 1882 history begins. In February 1857 Isaac Tibbot, whose house of 1834 was the first on the site, laid out eighty lots on both sides of the track. William Knepper built the second house early that year and George Steinberger, the miller, another about the same time. Tibbot put up the first store building, where a Mr. Miles sold dry goods and notions, followed by David Hale and then Elias Strous of Ligonier; John Knepper opened the second store and Dr. Goodson a drug store.
About 1867 Ellis & Mummert built a three-story frame gristmill costing $15,000 that made as much as a hundred barrels of flour a day. When prices were low the owners bought wheat on the Chicago board of trade, milled it at Wawaka and shipped the flour east, the railroad charging them a through rate as if the grain had never been unloaded. Fire destroyed the mill, with a shingle factory and a sawmill, in 1874, and it was not rebuilt; Mummert put up a steam sawmill and made handles and “shims,” Mr. Dodge added a planing mill, and in 1880 the grain buyers shipped about 50,000 bushels of wheat from the village.
Wawaka’s first school was a log house of about 1847 on the west side of Main Street, north of the railroad; its first teacher, Enoch Kent, did not last, for when the large boys told him to “git,” the historian wrote, he “wisely and rapidly obeyed.” A combined church and schoolhouse built soon after the plat served the Methodists for years, and the German Methodists built a church of about $3,000 around 1881. In 1920 the village had about four hundred people, telephone service from the People’s Mutual company and one rural mail route, but no bank; its people banked at Ligonier. Elkhart Township counted 2,062 people in 2020.
