Pole Barns & Post-Frame Builders in Shipshewana, IN

Shipshewana is home base. This small LaGrange County town is the tourism and commercial heart of the Elkhart-LaGrange Amish settlement, the third-largest in the United States, in a county that is roughly 44 to 45 percent Amish. It is known well beyond the area for its flea market and auction, running since 1922 and one of the Midwest's largest, and for the Menno-Hof center explaining Amish and Mennonite life, drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors a year and a rare commercial base for a town this size. Post-frame building is woven into the local economy: the barns, shops, and horse buildings on the farms around town, out through Newbury and Van Buren townships toward Shipshewana Lake, are the everyday work of the crews we connect you with. When we say proven Amish and local crews, this is the community we mean.

Shipshewana is the crew base, this is as close as it gets. The proven Amish and local crews building throughout Michiana work from right here, so a site visit in and around Shipshewana is immediate and local.

In town, the Town of Shipshewana office, (260) 768-4743, handles permits; unincorporated farm country routes through the LaGrange County Building Department in LaGrange, (260) 499-6300. One local quirk worth knowing: LaGrange County requires the building contractor to be registered with the county before a permit issues, so allow a few business days. The crew handles that. This is horse-and-buggy farm country with productive glacial soils and kettle lakes, where low areas near water carry a higher table that shapes post setting. Footings go below the local frost line, and full LaGrange County snow load is designed into every plan.