Boggstown, IN

Boggstown is an unincorporated community and census-designated place in Sugar Creek Township, Shelby County, centered on a crossroads that once joined the Bluff Road and the Fairland, Franklin and Martinsville Railroad. John McConnell and Armstrong Gibson platted the town in 1867, naming it for pioneer Joseph Boggs; earlier names included Houghburg and McWarren. Tobacco, grain shipping, general stores, churches, and the railroad gave Boggstown a busy nineteenth-century center.

Its most unusual historical footnote comes from a February 1861 meeting at the Boggstown schoolhouse, where Sugar Creek Township citizens debated the Union crisis and approved a conditional resolution favoring the Confederacy if the states divided. The Indiana Magazine of History preserves the document and the debate around it. Today the local inventory still points to Gibson Hall, the old grain business, churches, a post office, and the consolidated Sugar Creek school. Boggstown is a small Indiana community whose roads and buildings retain a railroad-era shape and a complicated Civil War-era memory.