A price nobody would pay

He was the eldest son of an Amish family, born in LaGrange County, raised on a farm two and a half miles southeast of Middlebury near a place called Yoder Corner.

He left school after the eighth grade, which is what Amish children do. I am not an educated man, he told a reporter in 2013, but I have learned a great deal over my lifetime.

His father farmed and made harness, and taught his son the trade. The son learned it and did it well and decided he did not want it.

So he went to work in a factory.

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Sometime around 1970 he built a miniature horse-drawn wagon for himself.

Not a toy. A working model of the thing his father made harness for, with the manes and the bridles detailed the way they would be on a full-size hitch, built by a man who had made the full-size version.

He put it in a plastic case and showed it to his father.

He told me to put it on display in his shop and he'd sell it. The fact that he felt it was good enough to display made me feel good. He asked how much I wanted to charge. I said you pick a price that no one will pay so I don't have to sell it.

It sold.

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Somebody wanted another one, and then a buyer from a department store found him.

In 1983 the catalogue orders came in for thousands of models. The company names Montgomery Ward, JC Penney and Sears. The newspaper that interviewed him named Sears and Woolworths. Either way it was more than a man could make in the back of his father's harness shop.

The next year he and his wife June bought a run-down building at the corner of Middlebury and Van Buren in Shipshewana.

He put six workers in the back making models. She ran a gift shop in the front. They called it the Shipshewana Craft Barn.

And what he used to organise the back of that building was the thing he had learned in the factory he took the job in to get away from harness. He knew how to run a production line.

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Two years later he bought a restaurant across the street.

It was called Der Strudel Haus and it seated somewhere between fifty and fifty-five people. He renamed it, because the old name was hard to say and hard to remember, and he called it the Blue Gate.

The name comes from a story about Amish families in Pennsylvania painting a gate blue to signal that a daughter was of marrying age. Riegsecker tells that story and then tells the other one, that a man ran out of white paint, and says the second is the logical one.

The restaurant grew to a hundred and five seats in two dining rooms. Then they knocked it down and built a new one with six dining rooms and seven hundred and fifty seats.

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What the Craft Barn became is now called Blue Gate Hospitality and it runs eight businesses.

The restaurant and bakery. The theatre. The Craft Barn. Shipshewana Furniture Company and a second furniture brand. A tour company. A carriage company. A hotel.

In 2019 they announced a new theatre with more than fifteen hundred seats. Fort Wayne Business put the cost at around three million dollars that April. The town manager, quoted in the Goshen News a month earlier, said the analysis had moved from about three point two million to about three point four. When it reopened after the pandemic, KPC News reported four and a half.

The town and the county's economic development corporation granted the company about four hundred thousand dollars over ten years toward it, out of the local economic development income tax. The town manager explained the mechanism on the record and said this is what it's ideal for. This is what it's used for.

Willie Nelson played the new theatre to four thousand three hundred people, which a company officer called the biggest concert Shipshewana had ever seen.

Shipshewana had eight hundred and thirty-nine residents at the 2020 census.

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The town those numbers belong to was not always that town.

It had two hundred forty-eight people in 1920 and two hundred seventy-seven in 1950. Then the flea market grew through the sixties and the population jumped to four hundred and forty-eight, and it has not fallen since. That decade has its own piece.

Mel Riegsecker bought his building in 1984, when the town had a little over four hundred and sixty people. It has eight hundred and thirty-nine now.

Whether the businesses made the town or the town's visitors made the businesses is not a question the record answers, and both are probably true. The flea market brought people before he was selling anything. What he built gave them somewhere to spend an evening. In the same decade he opened the Craft Barn, the churches built their own answer to the same crowds on the other side of town.

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A company officer said in 2024 that Riegsecker has retired from full-time operations and lives in Florida, where he still performs live music.

His son Ryan is president. His son-in-law Phil Heyerly is vice president. His daughter Kathy and his daughter-in-law Jodi are in the business, and some of the grandchildren are too.

He has been buying his own early models back at auctions.