Comfort food’s abundant in northern Indiana’s Amish towns. So are comfort conversations and up-close experiences with people who make things with their hands. I tried at least nine ways to calm down with calm people in small towns, and they all worked.
I spent four days in Shipshewana, Elkhart, Goshen, Middlebury, and Nappanee, plus tiny Topeka, Indiana, to find those nine experiences. Here’s where to look if you, too, need a little calm in your life.
Editor’s Note: The writer was hosted.
The People of Amish Country
Not everybody’s Amish here. Mennonites also live in the two counties named LaGrange and Elkhart. All of us non-Amish and non-Mennonites are considered “English.”
Shipshewana is the town name to connect in LaGrange.
Data declares 26,000 Amish people make up 44 percent of the population in this northern Indiana region that lies along the Michigan border. It’s the third largest Amish community in the United States.
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That means lots of possible encounters.
Try All These to Meet the Amish
1. Pies, Lots of Pies, Crusty and Fruity
2. Buggies, with Horses
3. Gardens Looking Like Quilts
4. Families Inviting Travelers to Lunch
5. Fast-Talking Auctioneers
6. Roadside Surprises
7. Noodles, Cheeses and Jellies
8. Leather Goods and Functional Baskets
9. Museums of History and of Art
Are you ready to explore off the beaten path? Let us inspire you!
Pies, Lots of Pies, Crusty and Fruity
Seek out the pie menu, and the pie travel road map, when in Amish Country. Varieties and volumes seem way too much to fit in a conventional restaurant printed page.
Consider warm blueberry pie as comfort food. Good chance the dollop of vanilla ice cream on top comes from an Amish creamery supplied with milk from an Amish family farm.
Pies in these Indiana towns take round shapes quite often. Sometimes they’re shaped to fit in your hand. Those are called fried pies.
SheBuysTravel Tip: Find your way to Millersburg for Amish Kuntry Fried Pies. They’ll let you peek into the process and see how the pastry and the filling and the sheer number of hand-size pies take shape. Family is the backbone: parents and eight kids first built the business. Now with a facility beyond their home, employees work too. Flavors? Black raspberry, apple, peach, cherry, lemon and many more.
One of the places to expect the menu of pies as a separate item: Blue Gate Restaurant & Bakery in Shipshewana. Thirty! That’s the whopping number of pie types baked at Das Dutchman Essenhous in Middlebury says Joel Miller, grandson of the founder, and campus manager today.
Buggies, With Horses
“Normal” takes on a new meaning during an Amish Country holiday, or at least it did for me.
Day One: Staring and pointing, gawking even, at horses clip-clopping on city streets, pulling minimalist black buggies.
Day Two: Admiring the buggy drivers’ patience going 10-12 miles per hour, wondering if people at the steering wheel of cars and trucks felt the same calm.
Day Three: All looks normal by now, familiar, just fine. Guess I’m the one who adjusted.
Women drive buggies, not just the men. Pony carts come first as children learn to handle a harness—most likely hand-crafted by an Amish leather artisan.
Families consider age 16 a reliable point for owning the first buggy.
A fold-open trunk on the back, below the red warning triangle, signifies a deluxe buggy. A 12-volt battery powers the lights, but the driver or a passenger hand-powers the windshield wipers.
Hostetler told me magnets keep the windshield shut or held open. Possible, but not routine? A strap to secure a baby carrier.
Travelers generally don’t need funeral services, but this buggy-maker also builds coffins. Not caskets, he teaches, but coffins. The difference? Flat tops and square corners define a casket, Hostetler says. He uses local poplar for sloped tops and curved, not square, sides for coffins.
SheBuysTravel Tip: Hang out in the buggy-building shop of Maynard Hostetler in Topeka to peer inside a four-seater at every stage of construction. Could set you back $11,000 to buy one, or just $450 for a single seater. Many children fill Amish families so consider how many buggies might be needed. Keep your eye peeled going to and from the buggy shop because hand-crafted birdhouses might be on a corner, with a box for honor-system payment.
Gardens Looking Like Quilts
May 30 to mid-September is the season for garden quilts in this part of northern Indiana.
Stitchers of quilts no doubt recognize the traditional themes and patterns. The rest of us rely on big signs next to each quilt garden telling the title, history and design details.
Murals of quilt designs appear along the way, too. A dozen of them, hand-painted.
One early morning at the Burst of Joy quilt featuring red begonias and yellow marigolds, I saw the gardeners – two young Amish women who scurried away, presumably satisfied with their weeding and tending.
In front of the courthouse in Goshen, I found a Log Cabin design quilt garden. Purple petunias, red and green leaf begonias and orange marigolds form the structure of this traditional architectural design.
SheBuysTravel Tip: Count on random discoveries of the 16 quilt gardens because they’re large and visible from the road. Or download the Heritage Trail audio tour from VisitElkhartCounty.com
Families Inviting Travelers to Lunch
Visitors can eat dinner in an Amish home, and also lunch. Many of the same flavors present themselves on restaurant menus, but the chance to chat with the family and look through the kitchen door to admire the cooking differs in a house.
Calm and comfort seep through these spaces, reason enough to book a seat at the table.
Amish families must register for serving (and selling!) home meals, so this is a regulated experience. Room size, restrooms and floor space makes it feel more like a business than a home, but looking out the windows to see the one-horse buggy suggests otherwise.
What Might the Yoders Serve?
A family named Yoder – one of the most common surnames among Amish families – serves dinner starting with salad, ending with pies and featuring multiple meats, veggies, noodles and potatoes in the middle. My group of 15 lined up on both sides of a long table and passed platters and bowls family style.
A family group of nine followed that same pattern across the room.
Fresh baked bread always shows up, warm and aromatic. My dinner night the bread included garlic and cheese and the salad brimmed with cauliflower and broccoli.
The meat-grilling father chatted with everyone while serving his platters; the kitchen-based mother joined the tables for dessert conversation and the daughters and granddaughters kept serving bowls refilled and dishes washed.
SheBuysTravel Tip: Book in-home meals through VisitShipshewana.org or call 260-768-4008. Chances are good a party of two or four can join larger bookings for this experience.
Lunch in Topeka, Indiana
Lunch at the Carriage House – the Amish family home of Seth Jones in Topeka – taught me about the traditional layered “haystack” meal. Poetry figures in, too, with the meal’s harvest-based explanation.
Think of rice as the foundation and beef the soil. Then broken soda crackers as rocks from the field topped by veggies of the day’s harvest. A dollop of sour cream becomes clouds with sunflower seeds as rain drops.
Melted cheese? Sunshine! And then some stars-in-the-sky chow mein noodles . . . or were they the needle in this haystack?
Fast-Talking Auctioneers
Nine auctioneers chant their own distinctive cadence in a huge space, each selling hundreds of items to skilled dealers and also curious newbies – that’s high energy every Wednesday from 9 a.m. sharp until 1-ish p.m. in the Shipshewana Auction.
Kindness and consideration too, so long-time auctioneer LaWayne Miller told me.
“We loosen up the atmosphere with fun and humor to make sure everyone is satisfied,” he says. “Buyers and sellers, too.”
One side of the auction house is where you’ll find the livestock sales. On the other side sprawls an enormous collection of 700 flea market booths; they’re open Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
Kindness Reigns Here
The comfort and care permeating Amish endeavors shows up in auctioneering, too. Benefit auctions on a personal scale for medical bills or family emergencies seem as frequent as fundraisers for the same purpose staged by Amish family bakers.
Indiana requires licenses for auctioneers; next-door Michigan does not. Want to practice for the chanting test? Try this:
Betty Botter bought some butter,
But she said this butter’s bitter.
If I put it in my batter,
It’ll make my batter bitter.
So she bought a bit o’batter butter,
Put it in her bitter batter,
Made her bitter batter better.
So tis better Betty Botter bought a bitter batter butter.
Roadside Surprises
“We have seven children and live on only five acres, so what can we do for a business?”
Seemed a reasonable question to Vonda Miller when I met her only because I stopped at a small shed on the side of the road in Topeka filled with vases of bouquets, and an honor box for leaving a payment.
Flanking the shed stood seven rows of flowers, supported by a lattice of soft string.
“We’re happy for people to cut their own bouquet, or just take photos in the flower rows with their kids,” Miller said.
I never met the owner of the birdhouse shed on another road, but left my $10 in the honor payment box.
Noodles, Cheeses and Jellies
Noodles matter in Amish Country, Indiana, and so do their makers. Everyone seems to have a family story of starting small, just parents and little kids, and now making and selling lots of noodles, sometimes hiring employees.
Often they’re served on top of mashed potatoes. Be willing; I thought the combo tasted rather delicious.
Dutch Country Market
Norm Lehman says he was “born to want to sell things. No woodworking for me.”
Buying noodles of many widths in his shop where you can watch the making-them process is quite a pleasure. Their secret? Real egg yolks, water and Durham flour, Norm says.
That’s it. No preservatives. The flour’s grown further north, like North Dakota. The yolks arrive in big buckets, separated from their whites. Water comes from the tap, no special qualities.
All the noodles are named for his wife Katie. She and the children shared in the family business startup and Norm says, “I really struggled when we had to hire outside help too.”
Bees work their honey-making magic in a demonstration hive inside Dutch Country Market; family-made jams, salsas, breads, apple butter and fudge line the shelves.
Buy functional, beautiful hand-crafted wood items too—but not made by Norm, true to his early sense of self.
Heritage Ridge Creamery
The milk’s local for making cheeses at Heritage Ridge Creamery – 500 regional farms – but the business morphed from Amish-founded to a Michigan corporate owner.
The front side of the Creamery holds products made there; the back side features a wide array from elsewhere.
Toothpick holders and cut-up bites of Amish Creamery, a butter cheese, or thunder jack, a blend of colby to calm down pepper jack, among others, make tasting easy.
Carolyn’s Kitchen
Jams and jellies grace tables and family cottage shops throughout Amish Country. The flavors in Carolyn’s Kitchen in Topeka boast natural juices, no added sugars or sweeteners.
Peeking beyond the shop – which also holds quilted wall hangings and smaller hand-stitched items – reveals the kitchen with a normal-size stove and tall-sided pots where the jelly stirring happens.
Favorite flavors include lavender, cherry-rhubarb and jalapeno. Carolyn Yoder’s surprising secret is this: “The best jams are made with fruit that’s frozen, not fresh picked.”
Leather Goods and Functional Baskets
Silver Star Leather
Solar powers the artisan workshop of Loren Yoder, turning cowhides into soft wallets, purses, belts and backpacks. He discusses the attributes of full grain, top grain and suede as easily as African cape buffalo or alligator belly skins in his cottage shop in Shipshewana.
Watching him create handsome, functional items with leather tools that seem simple speaks volumes about modest Amish attitudes with highly skilled endeavors.
Teaberry Wood Products
I bought a wooden lion at the enormous flea market in Amish Country, hand carved with many pieces, and intricate enough I’ll be challenged if it falls from my shelf and separates.
Then I found another of the cottage shops in this calm and comforting region offering classes in basketmaking—-same artisans of woodworking called Teaberry.
I was all thumbs navigating the slats and glue, toothpicks and metal clips—but signed my name on the bottom after patient Amish teacher guidance.
Museums of History and Art
Menno-Hof: Amish & Mennonite Story
Menno-Hof looks like a big red barn. Inside, 25 galleries with distinctly different designs and audio, video and interactive exhibits address a religious history that began in 1525 with the Anabaptists and influences Amish and Mennonite families today.
Menno-Hof in Shipshewana draws its name from Menno Simons, a leader of the Anabaptist movement and the German word for farmstead.
SheBuysTravel Tip: A couple of hours in the museum’s an easy way to gather perspective about Amish communities and their philosophies. Each gallery differs from the others, doors often close between them and all that variety supports staying interested.
Midwest Museum of American Art
“Embrace living artists—we do that here,” says one of America’s longest serving art curators, Brian Burns.
Works by very fine dead artists also hang in the Midwest Museum of American Art in downtown Elkhart, Indiana, including an original 1931 Grant Wood titled “Sheaves of Corn.”
“We embrace living artists through Best of Show awards and purchases,” Burns says with animation. His long career happiness shows strongly even after 44 years on the job.
Throughout the museum’s open galleries, nooks and crannies, even a large bank safe displaying coins as sculpture, find 200 years of American art, part of the permanent collection of 6,500 objects.
SheBuysTravel Tip: Head to the second floor for a wall of Norman Rockwell signed and numbered lithographs, considered the largest public collection of Rockwells in America.
Where To Stay
Hotel Elkhart
Lodging smack dab in the middle of downtown surely makes visiting easy: walking to dinner, the art museum, the theater. Hotel Elkhart fits that bill with 93 rooms and suites. Built in 1923 with 100 guest rooms, this tallest building in town served other purposes from 1974-2021 before re-opening as a hotel.
I appreciated the padded bench at the foot of both my queen bed. Sure I could sit to put on my shoes, or offload totes and shoulder bags. Best purpose was laying open my double-sided suitcase.
Luggage racks folded in hotel closets accommodate top-opening suitcases but I see lots more fold-open styles like my Away or Ricardo being wheeled around airports.
Hotel Elkhart renovations by
I leaned into the hotel’s long view of downtown from the High Note Rooftop Bar, watching the sun set and orienting myself to the town’s layout and the Elkhart River.
The ground-level restaurant rescued me (despite my 10:00 p.m. arrival after a delayed flight to Chicago O’Hare) with a pasta and shrimp dish made from scratch and piping hot.
Blue Gate Garden Inn & Conference Center
Look for blue gates in more places than Garden Inn in Shipshewana, Indiana. Expect a Blue Gate bakery and restaurant, connected to a 315-seat music hall with live shows, sometimes adaptations of popular Amish romance novels by Beverly Lewis.
Furnishings too, the Shishewana Furniture Company.
Stroll from the Garden Inn’s 155 rooms across the parking lot and into the Blue Gate Performing Arts Center. Travis Tritt sold out the show my night in Shipshewana.
That’s convenient, and also remarkable: 1,500 seat theater filling the house year-round in a town with a population of just 850.
Blue Gate CEO Ryan Riegsecker created a memorabilia museum in the Performing Arts Center, with guitars and personal possessions of celebrities entertaining there.
He just as easily talks about his family, and the generations of parents and grandparents turning a living room-based little grocery into the complex Blue Gate is today.
The Riegsecker grandfather made leather harnesses, vital for horse-and-buggy transportation. Ryan’s father fashioned intricate replicas of Amish scenes which were sold through Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalogues.
The Inn includes a large indoor pool, hot tub, game tables and ice cream eatery, outdoor patio with rock water gardens and ample seating. The breakfast buffet includes an omelette station and multiple hot and cold choices.
A broad stairway in the spacious lobby gives a walking option to the second floor, where sofa-and-comfy chair seating invites conversations. Do not expect to feel isolated; do expect friendliness.
Blue Gate Inn & Conference Center suites offer families a kitchenette, living room, sometimes bunkhouse style beds for kids.
Free WiFi, flatscreen televisions, coffee makers, hairdryers all routine.
Where to Eat
Pies and doughnuts can dominate Amish flavors in Shipshewana, Elkhart and communities all around. So can copious amounts of meat and everybody’s favorite version of cauliflower-broccoli salad.
Artisan
Walk to dinner at Artisan from the Hotel Elkhart and the Midwest Museum of American Art for a dinner more formal with precision serving than most other experiences are likely to be.
My group of four shared appetizers of salad with manchego cheese, steak frites and crab cakes. One big bowl of roasted Brussels sprouts satisfied our veggie side for entrees of filet mignon, shrimp risotto.
Artisan is intimate, easy conversation tones and the wait staff delivers plates in unison with perfection.
Das Dutchman Essenhaus
Think big – food portions, buffet selections, 180-acre campus – when going to Das Dutchman Essenhaus in Middlebury.
Stay there too, at the inn and conference center. Stroll through a quilt garden and some small shops. Eat pie: crusts made here, no preservatives added, no fruits from a can.
Eat noodles, or take a package home. Thousands are rolled out, not extruded, says founding family member Joel Miller. “That would change the molecular structure.”
He speaks of respect in other ways too. “We try to be true to who we are; we represent the Amish people well, never exploiting.”
Going for dinner? Know the potatoes will be mashed with whole milk and real butter.
Blue Gate Restaurant & Bakery
Meat lovers take note: Blue Gate Restaurant will recreate a “thresher” dinner, quantities to fortify field workers in charge of dawn-to-dusk agricultural work.
Platters of fried chicken, meatloaf, roast beef and ham surrounded bowls of noodles and mashed potatoes, corn and beans, dressing and gravy.
Fresh-baked bread already on the table launched the blend of mouth-watering aromas for passing, refilling, passing bowls and platters again.
Reasonable size plates can also be ordered.
Olympia Candy Kitchen
Goshen is the community to find hand-dipped chocolates, homemade caramel and traditional milkshakes and tall-glass soda fountain ice cream sundaes.
Mine was chocolate chip mint with double hot fudge at Olympia Candy Kitchen.
People in booths near mine ordered burgers and chili cheese fries; my chicken salad sandwich on toast looked bigger, fuller and far more delicious.
SheBuysTravel Tip: This is a restaurant with no public restroom. Plan ahead.
Getting To Indiana Amish Country
Chicago is 134 miles away, so that’s a drive market or car rental from O’Hare Airport. South Bend International Airport is 29 miles away, but likely to require flight connections.
Indianapolis and Detroit are three hour drives, and local folks say the route is easy, through stunning countryside. Grand Rapids is 97 miles from Amish Country.
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