Dear Pumpkinvine Nature Trail supporter, The final section of the Pumpkinvine Nature Trail between county roads 20 and 35 in Middlebury is now open to the public. Walkers, runners and cyclists can now travel easily between Goshen, Middlebury, and Shipshewana without leaving the safety of the trail. The vision, decades in the making, is finally complete. It’s difficult to fully …
By Brittany Short I remember attending my first Friends of the Pumpkinvine Board meeting in 2016. The most memorable item on the agenda that day explored the question: What does the Friends of the Pumpkinvine become after all the “gaps” are complete? Conversations about the Shipshewana extension had begun, we were actively engineering the section between County Roads 20 and …
Following John Yoder’s retirement in December 2019, Brittany Short became the second-ever board president in Friends of the Pumpkinvine Nature Trail history. In the preceding two and a half years, she guided the board through a handful of long-term board member retirements and final gap projects. In May of this year, Brittany resigned from the board of directors to take on …
We would like to congratulate Bud Wulliman and Andrea Thompson (October 2020) and Jane Short and Vivian Schmucker (June 2021) on their retirements from the Friends of the Pumpkinvine Board of Directors. Thank you for your selfless service to this community!
Photos of the newly installed signs on 2/19/2021; cement base covered in plastic to allow time to cure. If you’re driving along County Road 20 southwest of Middlebury, or are adventurous enough to be pedaling by, you may notice a new sign has appeared along the Trail. This Donor Recognition sign has been in the works for several years, …
In May 2018, I attended the Mid-America Trails and Greenway Conference in Columbus, Ohio and went to a workshop titled “Building and Maintaining Sustainable Organizations” led by the first onsultant the Friends of the Pumpkinvine ever had, Rory Robinson, from the National Park Service Rivers, Trails and Conservation Assistance Program in Cleveland, Ohio. One of the questions discussed in the …
On April 24, 2018, the Friends of the Pumpkinvine held our annual dinner in Elkhart for the first time. Our previous 16 dinners had been in the Pumpkinvine towns of Goshen, Middlebury or Shipshewana, and although we have many supporters in Elkhart, we weren’t sure if people from the three main towns identified with the Pumpkinvine Nature Trail would travel …
I’ve lost track of the number of community meetings I’ve attended where the speakers praised trails like the Pumpkinvine as an important element in improving the quality of life in a community, along with good schools, meaningful jobs and a strong business community. One such meeting was at the Lerner Theatre several years ago when the president of the Community …
From the president Recently I purchased a copy of the Indiana Amish Directory 2017: Elkhart, LaGrange, and Noble Counties, a 1090-page volume edited by Joas and Freda Miller from Middlebury, Ind. In the forward, the editors say: “Our goal for the Directory is to make it a reliable source of birth, marriage, and death date information. Also we try to …
