07/23/2026
A little over a century ago, one of the most famous small towns in America sat on the shore of a spring-fed lake in Kosciusko County. Winona Lake was a Chautauqua resort, a place where families came by the trainload each summer for music, lectures, boating, and religious revival. At its height it drew crowds in the tens of thousands to a great wooden tabernacle at the water's edge.
Its most famous resident was Billy Sunday, the former major league baseball player turned fiery evangelist, who was for a time the most famous preacher in the country. He built a rustic bungalow beside the lake and made Winona his home base, and where Billy Sunday lived, the nation's attention followed. Presidents, performers, and reformers all passed through this quiet Indiana town.
For decades Winona Lake was a world of straw hats and steamboats, of hymns carried across the water on summer nights, a genteel scene that felt far away from the factories and farms of the rest of the state. Then tastes changed, the great Chautauqua movement faded, and the crowds thinned.
The town never disappeared. Billy Sunday's home still stands as a museum, the old village has been lovingly restored, and visitors still stroll the lakeshore where thousands once gathered to listen and to rest.
Have you ever visited Winona Lake or toured the Billy Sunday home, and what do you think keeps drawing people back to places like this?
