Ambia

History

Ambia was laid out by Ezekiel M. Talbot and his wife Marietta on February 22, 1875, and named for their daughter Ambia Talbot. (The couple had two years earlier planned the nearby town of Talbot.) Its first building was a house erected by James C. Pugh which was soon joined by a grain elevator, general store and blacksmith. A drug store, hardware store, hotel, physician and a variety of other establishments followed. Ambia was a stop on the Lafayette, Muncie and Bloomington Railroad (later the Lake Erie and Western) which ran between Lafayette and Hoopeston. The Wabash Railway Company, which built a stretch of the LM&B through Illinois, originally wanted to construct a railway switch at a site known as Weaver City, a small town just west of Ambia in Vermilion County, Illinois; the owner of the property, however, refused to grant land for it. In response, the railway officials sent a force of men without notice to move the station house from Weaver City half a mile east across the state border, which they did on the Sunday morning of March 10, 1873. The town's businesses and residents followed and Weaver City faded from existence while Ambia sprang up near the station's new site.

Geography

Ambia is located in the extreme southwest corner of the county, in Hickory Grove Township. The Kankakee, Beaverville and Southern Railroad and Indiana State Road 352 pass through the town, and the upper end of the North Fork of the Vermilion River flows past one mile to the north.

Race & ethnicity

Most-observed species

• American Robin

  Turdus migratorius Linnaeus, 1766 · Aves
  250
• Mourning Dove

  Zenaida macroura (Linnaeus, 1758) · Aves
  227
• Northern Cardinal

  Cardinalis cardinalis (Linnaeus, 1758) · Aves
  184
• Red-winged Blackbird

  Agelaius phoeniceus (Linnaeus, 1766) · Aves
  176
• House Finch

  Haemorhous mexicanus (P.L.Statius Müller, 1776) · Aves
  155
• European Starling

  Sturnus vulgaris Linnaeus, 1758 · Aves
  152
• Common Grackle

  Quiscalus quiscula (Linnaeus, 1758) · Aves
  144
• House Sparrow

  Passer domesticus (Linnaeus, 1758) · Aves
  128

Most recent

• M 2.5 — 2023-10-31
  7 km ESE of Linden, Indiana
• M 3.82 — 2021-06-17
  Illinois-Indiana border region