The story
Welcome to Ashley
Ashley was platted on July 18, 1892, by the Wabash Railroad’s land company after neighboring Hudson declined to help pay for the line. It was a busy division point with a roundhouse and shops until 1907, when the railroad moved them to Ohio; the town straddles the DeKalb–Steuben line, with State Road 4 as the boundary.
Steuben Township was first settled in 1835 by Seth W. Murray, Isaac Glover, Alexander Britton, Reuben Warwick, James Forbes and Daniel Cummings. Its southwest corner, on the DeKalb County line, stayed farmland until the Wabash Railroad was built through in the early 1890s. The railroad, the 1920 county history says, made a demand on the citizens of Hudson, just to the west, for aid toward the road; “the people did not respond, hence the oft repeated story of a railroad corporation going out and platting their own townsite.”
The Indiana Improvement Company, the railroad’s land company, platted Ashley on July 18, 1892, on sections 31 and 32 of Steuben Township, and the town grew across the line into Smithfield Township of DeKalb County. The town says it was named for Ossian W. Ashley, president of the Wabash. The railroad made it a division point, with a fifteen-stall roundhouse and car shops, and George W. Strayer, one of the new arrivals, started the Ashley Times.
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In 1907 the railroad moved its division point and shops about twenty-five miles east to Montpelier, Ohio. The 1920 Steuben chapter called it “a hard financial blow to Ashley,” and the DeKalb chapter wrote that the town had steadily declined, with much of its platted land bought up for farms; the big red-brick hotel of the railroad years stood, the Steuben writer said, “a monument to other, earlier and in a way livelier times.” Only part of the shop building was left, housing the pump for the railway water tank.
The town turned to other work. In 1919 it had steam roller mills, a branch of the National Casket Case Company making cement burial vaults from about 1913, a canning factory for tomatoes, corn and beans, and a pickle-salting works, besides a farmers’ cooperative store that had moved over from Hudson. The Commercial Bank of Ashley dated from 1910. Ashley had 850 people in 1910 and about 1,000 in 1919.
Today the northern third of the town lies in Steuben County and the southern two-thirds in DeKalb, divided by State Road 4, State Street. The railroad station the two towns shared was called Hudson-Ashley. The 2020 census counted 1,026 people in Ashley.