The Klondike Saw Mill mural can be found on one side of the
Landmark Woods building on State Road 5 in Shipshewana. It is the southernmost of the sixteen murals
painted in Shipshewana in the summer of 2014 by a group known as the Walldogs.
The mural says the sawmill was founded in 1864 and at some
point, the proprietor was Abraham Farver.
A little googling told me that the mural was painted by Astoria Design
Studio of Portland Oregon. Their website
said that “The
original Klondike Sawmill was steam-powered and looked something like an old
locomotive.” I wanted to find out more.
The Shipshewana Area Historical Society website has an old photo of half a dozen men
standing on an enormous cut log. The
caption says it was taken at “the original Klondike saw mill near Abraham
Farver’s homestead.”
The Shipshewana town website tells us more. The town history page says that the sawmill was
first located south of where Shipshewana now stands, but the Farver brothers
(Jonathan and William) moved their business into town when the railroad came
(in the 1880s), and the new railroad built a switch line back to the mill. Their lumberyard and sawmill were located on
the east side of town (the section founded by Hezekiah Davis), where the town park is today.
I next looked at a book called The History of Northeast Indiana, written by Ira Ford in 1920. It contained a long biography of the Farver
family. By 1920, Abraham’s son Jonathan
was the head of the Farver Lumber Company.
According to the book, Jonathan’s parents, Abraham and Harriet Snyder
Farver, had moved the family from Holmes County, Ohio to Lagrange County,
Indiana in 1863. They purchased a farm
about four miles south of what later became Shipshewana. Abraham was a millwright by trade (one who
designs or builds mills), but now he spent part of his time working as a
cabinet maker as well, and from the information on the mural, he must have
started the Klondike Sawmill soon after arriving in Indiana. The book says that Jonathan learned cabinet
making from his father. After spending
27 years as a building contractor, Jonathan and his brother William opened a
sawmill in the developing town of Shipshewana in 1889.
I wanted to know more about Abraham Farver. For that, I turned to ancestry.com.
Abraham and Harriet were married in Ohio in 1855. The 1860 census shows them living on a farm with
their three young children (and Harriet’s unmarried sister) in Holmes County,
Ohio. The agricultural schedule shows
that they own 40 acres of land valued at $1400, where they are growing wheat,
Indian corn, and oats, and raising livestock.
By the 1870 census they are settled in Indiana, and Abraham
is listed as a farmer with land valued at $2800. They have six children, ages 3 to 14. Sadly, Harriet died the next year at age 43.
1880 finds Abraham a widower and still listed with farming
as his occupation. All six children
still live at home, now aged 13 to 24.
The oldest son, the aforementioned Jonathan, is listed as a carpenter.
Abraham died in 1893 at age sixty, surviving his wife by 22
years. They are buried at Miller
Cemetery in Shipshewana.