Read time: 3 min.

If you weren’t looking for the place, you’d pass right through Reed Station without ever knowing it was there. Like so many Indiana hamlets born of the railroad and sustained by routine rather than size, Reed Station survives today more in memory than in markers. I visited recently and tried to uncover its story. 

Back in 1992, Margaret Hensley sat down with reporters from the Muncie Star to talk about Reed Station, where she’d called home her entire life. She understood something important then: “If I don’t tell how Reed Station used to be, maybe nobody else will¹.” More than thirty years later, it’s my turn to take her words seriously and tell its story.

The hamlet of Reed Station was platted in 1877 as a stop on the Lafayette, Muncie, and Bloomington Railroad. Named in honor of local William Reed, who owned cattle pens along the rail line, a post office served the community until 1901².

The town’s post office was in a grocery store run by D. Chapman on the north side of town³, but, surprisingly, the community never featured a schoolhouse. Instead, pupils went to nearby Cammack for grades one through eight. If kids were inclined to study beyond that point, they ventured four miles to Yorktown⁴. 

The grocery store eventually relocated to the corner of Jackson Street Pike and County Road 700-West. Although Reed Station was also home to a stockyard, toll gate, and a grain elevator, Reed Station Christian Church has always been a focal point of the community. Today, it’s the only non-residential structure in town! The congregation was founded in 1886⁵ but the present building was built in 1977 after its elderly predecessor, remodeled several times, was finally torn down⁶. 

Today, there might be forty houses in Reed Station. By any modern measure, it’s barely a dot on the map. Still, though, places like Reed matter. Its residents shopped at a small grocery, worshipped at the Christian Church, sent their children down the road to school, and measured distance not in miles but in familiarity.

Margaret Hensley understood that kind of place instinctively. When she spoke up in 1992, she wasn’t chasing nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake; she was pushing back against disappearance. Small communities like Reed Station fade not all at once, but piece by piece, until all that’s left is silence and a name no one quite remembers. Telling their stories, even briefly, is a way of anchoring them in time.

Sources Cited
1 4 Hillman, R. (1992, August 31). Our Neighborhood. The Muncie Star Press. p. 4. 
2 Flook, C. (2019). Lost Towns of Delaware County, Indiana. The History Press [Charleston]. book.
3 (See footnote 1).
4 (See footnote 1). 
5 Roysdon, K. (1997, October 20). There’s no more rattling pot lids here. The Muncie Star Press. p. 7.