The land northeast of the line was obtained in 1818 in the Treaty of St. Mary’s, known as the “New Purchase.”[4] The area encompassing the village of Story was opened to European settlement on September 30, 1809.

The so-called “Ten O’clock Treaty” opened three million acres (12,000 km2) to settlement, the boundary being a line running from Raccoon Creek on the Wabash River near Montezuma to Seymour, marked by a shadow cast at 10:00 a.m. each September 30.

Family farms, the doctor’s medical practice, a township school and a grist mill were established over the following twenty years, prompting local reference to the area as "Storyville".

[5] Story grew in regional importance during the nineteen teens as other villages in Van Buren Township, Brown County, Indiana began to fade.

A saw mill was later added and previously written narratives indicate Story also had a blacksmith shop and a slaughterhouse, both of which were commonly found in small rural villages.

Oral interviews claim the store served as the wool-buying center for the county, with Wheeler taking the wool to mills in Seymour, Indiana, and that it employed six full-time employees.

When the government began offering to buy their land in the 1920s for creation of Brown County State Park (opened 1929), many farmers gladly accepted.

With the coming of the Great Depression (1929–1933), many families also abandoned their farms in search of work elsewhere, a departure not unlike that narrated in John Steinbeck's, The Grapes of Wrath.

Little new construction followed the Great Depression, and fortuitously, no one attempted to “modernize” the venerable but aging structures at Story when the rest of the nation embarked upon a campaign to eliminate unsightly wooden floors, stamped tin metal ceilings and globe lighting and replace them with shiny asbestos floor tiles and dropped fiberboard ceilings sporting snazzy new recessed neon bulbs.

Story sits at the edge of Salt Creek, a labyrinthine 100-mile (160 km) system of quiet, slow-moving tributaries which now form the backwaters of Lake Monroe.

In 1978, Benjamin (one name) and his wife, Cynthia Schultz, purchased four and a half acres that included the grocery store, grist mill, barn, and a small rented house.

A federal bankruptcy was followed by receivership, and the entire town was sold at sheriff's sale on February 14, 1999, to an entity owned by Rick Hofstetter, an Indianapolis attorney and preservationist, and Frank Mueller, a German-born restaurateur.

The village of Story, Indiana, is now a country inn/bed & breakfast The second floor of the Old General Store (Wheeler-Hedrick General Store; local lore is that it was also once a Studebaker buggy dealership where wagons and buggy were assembled) has been renovated into four bed & breakfast accommodations notable the “Blue Lady.” The Blue Lady is supposedly an innocuous apparition with flowing white robes whose cheeky behavior has been observed by Story Inn employees and recorded in guest books since the 1970s.

The Inn is just thirteen miles from the village of Nashville, Indiana and is located adjacent to the southwestern boundary of Brown County State Park.