The decade it turned

Ira Ford came through in 1920 and wrote the town off in a sentence.

In reality this town is not much better in point of industry than it was a decade and more ago.

He was not being unkind, he was counting. A sawmill, a bank, a newspaper, a lumber company, a grist mill, an elevator. Incorporated four years. No water system. He put the population at about six hundred, which was generous. The federal census that year counted two hundred forty-eight inside the town line. The place had been platted in 1889 by Hezekiah Davis and his wife Sarah, thirty-one years before Ford wrote that.

Two years later a farmer named George Curtis sold some animals.

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The story, as his family's successors tell it, is small enough to fit in a sentence.

Six pigs, seven cows and several head of young cattle, sold at Curtis's house in 1922. That was the first Shipshewana livestock auction. It went well enough that he built a barn at his home to hold the next one.

There was reason for it. Ford had just described a town sitting in what he called a rich, well cultivated farming section, a good trading point with stores and shops and mills. The farms were there. The buyers were there. What was missing was a place to bring an animal on a fixed day and find out what it was worth.

Curtis ran it for twenty-five years. Fred Lambright bought it from him in the late forties and moved it to the ground it still occupies.

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For thirty years, none of it showed up in the census.

The town had two hundred forty-eight people in 1920 and two hundred eighty-six in 1940. In 1950 it had two hundred seventy-seven, which is nine fewer than a decade earlier.

An auction is not a town. It is a morning. People drive in, sell an animal or buy one, and drive home, and the place they sleep is somewhere else. Curtis built a barn and Lambright moved it and for a generation the effect on the town of Shipshewana was almost nothing you could count.

Then the sixties.

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Walter Schrock bought the business in 1961.

Over that decade the flea market that had grown up alongside the auction went from about a hundred vendors to four hundred, by the company's own account. A hundred vendors is a sale. Four hundred is a destination.

The 1970 census counted four hundred forty-eight people in Shipshewana.

That is a hundred and thirty-six more than 1960, in a town that had gained thirty-eight in the previous forty years. It is the largest jump in the town's history and it has never lost population in a census since.

Four hundred sixty-six in 1980. Five hundred twenty-four in 1990. Five hundred thirty-six in 2000. Six hundred fifty-eight in 2010. Eight hundred thirty-nine in 2020.

Ford's town that was not much better in point of industry than it had been a decade before is now a town of eight hundred and thirty-nine people on a square mile and a third, and several thousand come through on a Wednesday.

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Robert Lambright and his sons Keith and Kevin bought it back in 1981, and the family has held it since.

After that the grounds were laid out for a thousand vendors. Then a hotel in 1997. A conference centre in 2003. An RV park in 2008, now a hundred sixty-five sites with full hookups. An event pavilion in 2012. A service centre for the RVs in 2016.

Four families in a hundred years: Curtis, Lambright, Schrock, Lambright again.

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Underneath all of it the auction still runs the way it ran.

Livestock every Wednesday, year round, ten in the morning. Dairy heifers first, then dairy cows, feeder cattle, veal, sheep, lambs, goats, in that order. A market report published every Thursday, so a farmer who did not come can find out what he would have got.

Antiques the same morning at nine, in as many as ten rings selling at once.

Horses on Friday at half past twelve. Saddle horses, ponies, work horses, loose horses, driving horses. Two special sales a year, Good Friday and the day after Thanksgiving, running into the evening with three hundred horses or more.

To bid you need a card. It costs a dollar, cash, and it lasts two years. You have to be eighteen and show a state photo ID.

The Friday sale is the one the county uses rather than the one the county is known for. Draft horses and driving horses, outside the flea market days, for people who need one rather than people who came to look. It is not in the company's own history at all. Nobody has written down when it started.

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In 2022 the auction turned a hundred and Keith Lambright stood up to mark it.

This community makes this sale barn. This community makes this happen. It's not about the Lambrights, or the Riegseckers, or the Yoders next door, it's about Shipshewana.

The census says the town was flat for forty years and then it was not.

Both things are true. The barn was here first, and for thirty years it changed nothing anybody counted. What changed in the sixties was that people started coming who were not buying a cow.

Two of the buildings they came to were put up across one street from each other, sixteen years apart, for the same reason.