Since 1991

It started with mustard and jam

Levi and Joanna King opened Kitchen Cupboard in 1991, inside Davis Mercantile. It was a shop of mustards, jams and jellies, with a little bit of coffee on the side.

The coffee took over. Before long Kitchen Cupboard was a coffee shop, and the mustards and jams moved across to Village Boutique, which the family opened soon after.

One family, a handful of shops

Kitchen Cupboard wasn’t the first. Levi and Joanna spent the summer of 1989 working out a pretzel recipe for a ten by ten foot space in the Mercantile, and opened JoJo’s Pretzels that November. Pretzels were 75 cents.

Sarah Davis Limited followed in 1993. A couple of years later they bought the Village Trading Post and made it into a home decor shop.

Later came hospitality. They ran a bed and breakfast on their farm in Middlebury for years, booking every guest themselves, long before anyone had heard of Airbnb.

Every one of those businesses has the same goal: when people come to Shipshewana, they should have a good time and want to come back.

A dark wood hutch holding a framed painting of a barn, dried flowers, and glassware — Barn art and dried flowers on the hutch.

The building has its own story

Hezekiah Davis paid ten thousand dollars out of his own pocket to bring a railroad to a small Indiana settlement in the mid-1800s. The town was called Davistown then, after him. He and his wife Sarah owned the land on the east side of it.

The Davises had known Chief Shipshewana. Not as a historical figure, as a neighbor. When the Potawatomi were forced out of Indiana in 1838, they watched it happen.

Years later Sarah asked Hezekiah to rename the town in the Chief’s honor. He did. Davistown became Shipshewana, and it has carried that name ever since because a woman asked for it.

A watercolor painting of the Davis Mercantile building, its gabled roof and DAVIS MERCANTILE lettering above the covered entrance — Davis Mercantile, in watercolor.

February 2004

Davis Mercantile burned to the ground.

The King family lost every shop they had inside it. JoJo’s, Kitchen Cupboard, Sarah Davis Limited. All of it, in one night.

So many people reached out afterward that coming back to the Mercantile was never really in question. The family rebuilt, and when the Mercantile reopened in 2006, we opened with it.

What we are now

A coffee shop on the first floor of a building this family has been part of since 1989. Timber beams overhead, hardwood underfoot, a counter along the window.

We buy our beans from Regina Troyer at Refinery Coffee Co. in Goshen, twenty miles from here.

Regina grew up Amish in northern Indiana and started roasting in 2005. What began small now reaches thousands of people. She sources from more than fifteen countries, air-roasts and grinds on site, and still handles every step of it herself.

She says coffee is not just coffee, it is community. We buy from her because she is better at roasting than we would ever be, and because she is twenty miles away.

Our mission is to serve others, make great coffee, and share God’s love.

String lights hung along the timber beams, a barn plate on the wall below — String lights along the timber beams.

Still a family business

Joanna will tell you she couldn’t have done any of it without Levi, and neither of them could have done it without their kids. The hope now is that the grandkids grow up in these shops the same way, and become part of Shipshewana the way the family has.

Come sit down.

The wooden KC monogram letters standing beside a latte and dried wheat