By 1920 there were seven congregations across four townships, about eighteen hundred people in them, and each had come out of the one before it.
The congregation at the Forks was the first, organized in 1842. Joseph Miller came as its first resident minister in 1846, was made bishop in 1848, and served twenty-nine years. In 1866 it divided, and the new district in south and east Newbury took the name Yoder. In 1876 the Forks divided again to form North Barrens. In 1881 so many Yoder families had moved into Clearspring Township that a congregation was organized there, which later became two, and in 1901 the Yoder church divided again to form Honeyville, which also became two. None of the divisions, as the Gazette reads the 1920 account, was a quarrel: each was a congregation grown too large to meet in a house.
When the state enrolled LaGrange County's militia on October 19, 1862, ninety-one men were counted as conscientiously opposed to bearing arms.
Shipshewana was platted in January 1889. The Gazette, on what was here by then:
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.