The town came last

In the spring of 1844, two men rode into Newbury Township on horseback, two months out from Somerset County, Pennsylvania.

Daniel and Joseph Miller were on a prospecting tour. They came to Amos Davis's place, looked at the land, and bought farms. Daniel Miller took the old Woodbridge place. Christian and Joseph Bontrager bought in Sections 19 and 20 soon after. Emanuel Miller took land in Section 29. Philip Weirick came about the same time.

In November of that year, John C. Yoder arrived, also from Somerset County, born there in 1821. People called him the doctor for his skill in healing some of the human ills. He was still on his farm near the Moses Kaufman millrace on the Little Elkhart thirty-eight years later, when the county history published in 1882 called him a patriarch among the original Amish.

That was the beginning. Germans came from Pennsylvania first and later from Holmes County, Ohio, and they kept coming.

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By 1881 they had taken up almost the whole township.

There were three districts of the old school. The southern had a hundred sixty-one members, the western a hundred, the northern about a hundred twenty counting the part that reached into Van Buren. Each district had a bishop and two ministers, and only the bishop could baptize or marry. Dr. Yoder held one of those positions. David Kaufman held the other.

There were no meeting houses. They met at the homes of members, which is still how it works. There was no written creed. Feet washing was observed at meetings.

The county historian, writing from outside and plainly fascinated, recorded the details he found most striking. No ornament of any kind on the person. No paint or plaster in the houses and no bright color on the buildings. Buttons were under the ban, so hooks and eyes did the work. Lightning rods were forbidden for a time. German was spoken continually at home, which he understood correctly as another tie and another distinction from the world.

He also recorded two things that were not curiosities. The children were educated to read and write well. And the community allowed none of its members to depend on the county for support, while contributing to charities beyond it.

It was not one church even then. The New Amish were about twenty-five years old in 1881 and had roughly two hundred members and a frame meeting house at the Forks, built in 1863 for about six hundred dollars, seating five hundred. Jonas Troyer was bishop there. The new church went into the water for baptism and the old sprinkled on dry land. The Mennonites, from whom the Amish had originally separated, built on the Lake Shore road in the fall of 1874. The German Baptists, called Dunkers, started meeting in the Poynter Schoolhouse in 1854 and dedicated their own frame church on Christmas of 1874.

The county history notes, almost in passing, that Newbury had always been remarkable for its quietness and freedom from crime, and that this was especially true since the Amish and the other German churches had taken up most of the township.

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What the township did not have was a railroad.

Word came early that the Buffalo and Mississippi would build through. The county history says the hopes of the settlers were raised to a considerable height by the talk, and deeply sunk by its failure. The road was surveyed through the northern part of the township and never built.

The same thing happened again with a preliminary survey of the Baltimore and Ohio.

Writing in 1920, Ira Ford counted three lines surveyed through Newbury, all of which failed. For decades the township was hedged in and cut off for want of a road through its borders.

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Amos Davis had the post office in his house.

It was established in 1844, the same year the Millers rode in, and called Pashan. It ran out of his home until he moved away, and then it was discontinued.

Davis was born in Loudon County, Virginia, in 1797, went to Ohio as a boy, and came to Newbury in 1836 having entered land in Section 19 the year before. He built the second sawmill in the township. He was an associate judge for the county from 1839 until the office was abolished, and he sat in the legislature during the war on the side of Governor Morton. He moved to Greenfield Mills, and on his seventieth birthday he took an injury that killed him. He died on October 5, 1867.

His son Hezekiah was eleven years old when he first saw Newbury, and never left.

The county history says the boy went out with his father one day around 1840 and the two of them found fourteen bee trees in half a day. At twenty-three he had four hundred dollars saved and bought a hundred sixty acres with it. By 1882 he owned fourteen hundred acres and had forty thousand dollars out at interest. He ran the first reaper in the township, and the first harvester, and the first binder, and the first feed mill. In the early part of his life he put in eighteen hour days.

He served the county as commissioner, and his name is cut into the cornerstone of the courthouse in LaGrange.

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The Lake Shore and Michigan Southern finally built a branch through the northern part of Newbury, with a station fixed at Shipshewana.

In January of 1889, Hezekiah Davis platted a town in Sections 10 and 11. He platted it out of one of the two towns that were already there, which no county history records.

Ford, writing thirty years later, says it grew like magic. Brick buildings of modern style went up on every hand. A bank, a hotel, a public hall, and a Methodist church, all of them brick. He notes, as though it had only just occurred to him, that the new town sat near the old village and burial ground of the people who had hunted this country for centuries before anyone platted anything.

By 1920 the population was about six hundred. There was a bank, a newspaper called the Chronicle, a lumber company, a grist mill, a grain elevator, and sawmills, which were the chief industry. A brick school had gone up in 1893, two stories and seven rooms. Twenty-six buildings had electric light, from a private plant. There was no water system. The town had incorporated as a village on April 18, 1916.

And Ford, who had spent a page and a half describing all of it, ended with this:

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

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The railroad came in 1889. The town came in 1889. The bank, the hotel, the brick, the newspaper, the school, all of it after.

The people who make this place what it is had been farming here for forty-five years by then, in three districts, meeting in one another's houses, with no church buildings and no need of a town.