Bristol, Indiana

Bristol sits where the Little Elkhart River meets the Saint Joseph River, three miles south of the Michigan line, in the heart of Amish country. James Nicholson brought his family here in eighteen twenty-nine, making him the first settler. Within a year a handful of other families had arrived, and by around eighteen thirty-five, Samuel Judson, Lewis Alverson, and Hiram Doolittle platted the town.

They named it for Bristol, England, the ancestral home of Judson's family. The town grew as a quiet agricultural market, never becoming large but serving the surrounding farms through the mid-eighteen hundreds. Today Bristol is a small town of around eighteen hundred, best known as the gateway to Elkhart County's vast Amish settlement, one of the largest in the United States.