The track was laid in 1888, and the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway ran the trains. The depot was the first building in town, put up that fall, and the first train passed through on December 25, 1888, from Goshen to Battle Creek.
Davis built facing the depot: two large brick buildings, the marker says, on opposite corners of Main and Morton streets. The 1893 county atlas names them: the three-story brick Davis Hall, which held the Shipshewana Bank, and the Hotel Davis opposite it, both built by Hezekiah Davis. The Blue Gate's history of the Davis Mercantile dates the hotel to 1891. Davis died that year, on September 26.
Ira Ford, writing in 1920, on the new town:
Brick buildings of modern style went up on every hand. A bank, a hotel, a public hall, a Methodist Church, all constructed of beautiful brick, soon beautified the place.
The hotel outlasted him by a century. In the 1960s it was moved from the corner of Main and Morton to a block on Main Street. In the 1980s the Miller family bought it and began refurbishing it, then built the Davis Mercantile around their plans for more shops than the hotel could hold. On February 28, 2004, a fire of unknown cause destroyed the Davis Hotel building and the Mercantile, then home to eleven shops. Rebuilding began that August; the owners called it an old-fashioned barn raising. The new building carries a 1906 Dentzel carousel on its third floor.