March 2026
Life along the county roads of LaGrange County, and the neighbors most people never really know
Drive into Wolcottville from almost any direction and you will share the road with a horse and buggy before long. Not as a tourist attraction. Not as a novelty. Just as a fact of the road, the way a tractor or a pickup truck is a fact of the road. LaGrange County is home to one of the largest Amish communities in the United States, and Wolcottville sits right in the middle of it. Nearly half the people in LaGrange County are Amish. For anyone passing through, that number is hard to believe until you have spent a week here.
The Amish arrived in this part of Indiana in 1841, when the first families moved west from Pennsylvania and Ohio in search of farmland. Four families settled in western LaGrange County and eastern Elkhart County. Within a generation the community had taken root. Today the combined Amish population of Elkhart and LaGrange counties is nearly 30,000, making it the third largest Amish settlement in the United States, behind Lancaster County in Pennsylvania and Holmes County in Ohio. The community has its own schools, its own businesses, and its own internal culture that has remained largely intact across nearly two centuries.
The physical signs are everywhere once you know to look for them. Buggy traffic on the county roads in the early morning. Roadside produce stands stacked with vegetables and baked goods. Clotheslines full of plain dark clothing running parallel to fields of corn. Push reel mowers in front yards instead of gas-powered ones. The more conservative Amish districts tend to be found on the eastern side of the settlement, closer to LaGrange, while the western side near Shipshewana is generally more progressive. Wolcottville sits in between, which means the community around town reflects that range.
A common misconception is that the Amish are purely agricultural. In LaGrange County, only a small fraction earn their living solely from farming. The majority work in factories, the building trades, or run their own businesses. Amish-owned businesses in Indiana have a failure rate of around five percent, compared to closer to fifty percent for non-Amish businesses nationally. The craftsmanship is one reason. The community networks are another. When Daniel Kragt needed skilled hands to reassemble an 18th-century Connecticut home as an addition to the restored Wolcott House, he worked with Amish craftsmen. The original beams and hand-hewn rafters were preserved throughout.
Most Amish in LaGrange County speak English, but most also speak Pennsylvania Dutch, a dialect rooted in Southern Germany that has been carried forward across generations and across an ocean. In 2000, more than 28 percent of LaGrange County residents reported speaking German, Pennsylvania German, or Dutch at home. That number has likely grown since.
Wolcottville and the surrounding Amish community have existed side by side for long enough that the relationship is mostly unremarkable, which is probably as it should be. They share roads, share businesses, share the same weather and the same soil. They do not share a great deal else, and neither side seems to need them to. It is the kind of neighborly arrangement that requires no name, just enough mutual respect to let each other get on with things.
The county roads around Wolcottville have been shared for almost two centuries. Nobody made a big deal about it. That is probably why it worked.