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Shipshewana was made by a railroad. In December 1888 the track of a crooked little line called the Pumpkin Vine was finished through the farms of Newbury Township, and a month later Hezekiah Davis recorded the plat of a new town beside it. It “grew as by magic,” and took its name from the lake to the north-west and the Potawatomi chief remembered there. The trains are gone now, but the auction George Curtis started in 1922 grew into one of the Midwest’s biggest flea markets, at the heart of one of the largest Amish settlements in the country.

At a glance

Founded

plat recorded by Hezekiah Davis, 18 January 1889, beside the Goshen–Sturgis railroad; post office 1889; incorporated as a village, 18 April 1916

Name

from Shipshewana Lake and its creek, named for a Potawatomi chief who signed treaties in 1828, 1832 and 1833; the name, Shup-she-wah-no, was explained in 1908 as “Vision of a Lion.” A county road ran to “the Shipshewana Saw-mill” by 1839

Two towns

Davis’s east side and Abram Summey’s west side, Davistown and Summeytown, divided by a 150-foot strip remembered as “No Man’s Land”

Railroads

the Pumpkin Vine (Sturgis, Goshen & St. Louis, then the Lake Shore and the New York Central), 1888–1980; the St. Joseph Valley line east to LaGrange, 1905–about 1918; the roadbed is now the Pumpkinvine Nature Trail

The auction

founded by George Curtis in 1922; the flea market began with sellers working out of their car trunks and was roofed over in 1947

Population

“over 500” in 1893; about 600 in 1920; about 650 today

County seat

no; the county seat of LaGrange County is LaGrange, about ten miles east

Stories on this site

• The Shipshewana Puzzle: One Name, at Least Five People The plaque says he died by the lake in 1841. That February, that November and that December his name was on papers in Kansas and Washington, and in 1842 it was on a government roll.
• The railroad that made Shipshewana The Pumpkin Vine made Shipshewana in 1888, went broke within months, and carried bank robbers by handcar.
• How a farm sale became a flea market George Curtis’s 1922 farm sale became the Shipshewana auction and flea market. Its famous millions were never counted; what has been counted points to a few hundred thousand.

Worth a visit

Through the year

• Shipshewana Ice Festival & Chili Cook-Off Mid-January, Friday–Saturday
• Shipshewana Lights of Joy Mid-November through December 31, nightly
• Shipshewana Flea Market season Early May to late September, Tuesdays & Wednesdays
• Giant Straw Bale Art Trail September through late October
• Christmas, Vintage & Craft Bazaar Friday 6 November, 8 am–4 pm
• Gingerbread Village at E&S Sales Daily, Friday 6 November – Saturday 5 December (store hours)
• Lighting of Shipshewana Festival Friday 6 – Saturday 7 November

Eat and stay

• Blue Gate Restaurant, 195 N. Van Buren St., Shipshewana, IN 46565. Family-style Amish cooking and pies in the center of Shipshewana, with a theater next door. Mel and June Riegsecker bought and fixed up an old Shipshewana factory building in 1984. In the mid-1980s they opened a 50-seat restaurant called Der Strudel Haus, which grew into the Blue Gate.
• Shipshewana Auction Restaurant, 345 S. Van Buren St., Shipshewana, IN 46565. Breakfast and lunch at the Trading Place on auction and flea market days (Wednesday 7–3 and Friday 7–2; breakfast until 11). The first Auction Restaurant opened in 1930 in George Curtis’s garage, run by the women of the Methodist church; Milo and Ruth Miller took it over in 1940, and Fred Lambright built a new one in 1950.
• Farmstead Inn, 370 S. Van Buren St., Shipshewana, IN 46565. A 151-room country-style hotel with a three-story atrium, indoor pool and free hot breakfast, steps from the flea market. Built by the Lambright family across from the auction and flea market in 1997; a conference center was added in 2003.

More places to eat and stay in the valley ›

Where the records are

Deeds, probate and marriage records are kept by LaGrange County at the courthouse in LaGrange. The LaGrange County Public Library’s county history and genealogy department, 203 W. Spring St., LaGrange, is the place to start, and the Shipshewana Area Historical Society keeps a small museum in the Farver Schoolhouse on Morton Street. The county histories of 1882 (Counties of La Grange and Noble), 1893 (the Columbian atlas), 1920 (History of Northeast Indiana) and 1936 (Waddell) are free in the Internet Archive, and so are the county commissioners’ dockets of 1832–49. Dorothy O. Pratt’s Shipshewana: An Indiana Amish Community (2004) is the modern history of the town and its Amish neighbors.

Sources

• Illustrated Atlas and Columbian Souvenir of La Grange County, Indiana (La Grange Publishing Co., 1893): “Shipshewana,” p. 106, and the town plat link
• Ira Ford and others, History of Northeast Indiana (Chicago: Lewis, 1920), vol. I: “The Town of Shipshewana,” pp. 143–44 link
• Counties of La Grange and Noble, Indiana (Chicago: F. A. Battey, 1882): Newbury Township link
• 7 Score and 10: La Grange County’s 150th Year (1982): George Curtis’s recollections and the county chronology link
• Jacob Piatt Dunn, True Indian Stories (Indianapolis, 1908), pp. 98–100 link
• La Grange County Board of Commissioners, docket, 1837–1841 (“the Shipshewana Saw-mill in Sec. 3,” 1839) link
• Shipshewana Trading Place, “History” link
• Pumpkinvine Trails Coalition, “About” link
• Dorothy O. Pratt, Shipshewana: An Indiana Amish Community (Bloomington: Quarry Books, 2004) link
• Visit Shipshewana (LaGrange County Convention and Visitors Bureau) link

Dates and names are from the county histories and official sources listed here. Where they disagree, we say so. Know better? Send a correction.

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