Amos's son Hezekiah came with the family in 1836. The marker at Main and Morton says he was ten; the Gazette's "The town came last" says eleven.
The 1882 county history tells his life as a run of firsts and figures. Around 1840 he and his father found fourteen bee trees in half a day. At twenty-three he had saved four hundred dollars and bought a hundred and sixty acres with it. He ran the first reaper in the township, then the first harvester, binder and feed mill, and in his early years he worked eighteen-hour days. By 1882 he owned fourteen hundred acres, mainly east of what is now State Road 5, and had forty thousand dollars out at interest. He served as a county commissioner, and his name is cut into the cornerstone of the courthouse in LaGrange.
What the township did not have was a railroad. Ira Ford, in 1920:
For many years this township was hedged in and cut off from other parts of the country because of the lack of a railroad line through its borders. Three lines of railway were surveyed, but all failed, until finally the branch of the Lake Shore and Southern passed through the northern part of the township, with a station point fixed at Shipshewana.
When a line was planned through Battle Creek, Sturgis and Goshen, the marker says, Davis paid $10,000 to bring it to his settlement, then called Davistown.