What happened next is not in the county histories. It is on the historical marker at Main and Morton, put up in 2000 by the Town of Shipshewana and the Davis and Summey descendants together.
As the population grew, the marker says, Davis decided a town was needed and paid $10,000 to bring the railroad to Davistown. He built two brick buildings facing the depot, and businesses came to them. Across the road Summey developed his own land the same way; the marker calls it Summeytown. Then it says this:
The rival developments generated animosity and suspected vandalism on both sides. This continued for several years.
The paper record kept the contest going after the town was platted. The 1893 county atlas lists the additions to Shipshewana as they were filed: Summey's first in April 1889, then Davis's first on May 5, 1890, Summey's second on January 5, 1891, Summey's third on December 19, 1891, and a second Davis addition by 1893.
Summeytown is missing from the list of original village plats in Ford's 1920 history, which can read as the Summeys being left out of their own town's record. They were not: an addition is not an original plat, and the list never claimed to hold one.
The two towns, the vandalism and the $10,000 rest on the marker alone, and its text is signed by a Davis, one of the two families it describes.