oday, the school operates as a living history museum documenting Lyles Station, a once-thriving town created by free African Americans. Photo provided by Indiana Landmarks
Before Indiana became a state, William Hood settled in Jefferson County along the Ohio River. Like many early residents, he was a veteran of the Revolutionary War.
What made Hood different was the fact he was a former slave who had run away from his owner in 1769 when he was just 16 years old.
Hood was one of thousands of free, Black settlers who migrated in the early 1800s from southern slave-holding states to Indiana when it was still a territory of vast, untamed forests and marshlands.
An ordinance approved by the U.S. Congress in 1787 banned slavery and involuntary servitude in the territory that would eventually become Indiana. When Indiana gained statehood in 1816, the new constitution also clearly prohibited slavery.
Still, the constitution didn’t give people like Hood the right to vote, testify in court against whites, join the militia or educate their children in public schools.
What they could do is buy land. That’s exactly what many did, leading to the settlement of more than 30 Black farming communities. Those settlements for decades banded together to survive raids, kidnappings and general hostilities from neighboring white settlers, according to Eunice Trotter, director of Indiana Landmarks’ Black heritage preservation program.
“As time went on, these settlements became places where Blacks could protect themselves and live unto themselves and do well among themselves,” she said.
BLACK SETTLEMENTS THRIVE
Many free Blacks from the South traveled with Quaker settlers, who offered protection on their journey and the promise of being good neighbors upon their arrival. That included Jonathan Lindley and 11 other Black families, who joined a group of sympathetic Quakers in search of a new land that forbade slavery.
Lindley eventually settled in Orange County in 1811. Just nine years later, census records show there were 96 Black people living there along Lick Creek, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forestry Division.
As more came to the area to purchase land, the settlement quickly swelled. By 1860, it encompassed nearly 1,560 acres with a Black population of about 260. An African Methodist Episcopal church built in 1843 became a focal point of the settlement, which was known locally as Little Africa, South Africa and Paddy’s Garden.
The community in Orange County was one of the earliest in Indiana, but more sprouted up all over the southern parts of the state throughout the early 1800s. The growth of Black settlements was strongest from the 1830s through the 1870s, with some reaching as far north as Howard, Grant and St. Joseph counties.
The Roberts Settlement in Hamilton County was part of that boom. In July 1835, African-American pioneers traveled from North Carolina to the federal land office in Indianapolis and purchased homesteads 30 miles to the north. By 1840, the neighborhood included about 10 families and 900 acres of land.
The arrival of a railroad in the 1850s allowed the community to thrive. By 1870, it included over 200 residents and 1,700 acres. Leaders emphasized the importance of education to prepare a new generation for college and careers in medicine, law and the clergy, according to the Indiana Historical Bureau.
Lyles Station in Gibson County was also a prominent settlement. It was founded in 1837 by Joshua Lyles, a free African American born around 1800 in Virginia. The Lyles family bought land near the confluence of the White, Patoka and Wabash rivers – fertile farming ground that led to a successful agricultural community. Shortly after the Civil War, Lyles returned to his boyhood home in Tennessee to encourage family, friends, free Blacks and newly emancipated slaves to settle in Indiana, according to the Indiana Historical Society.
By 1912, the community included a railroad depot, a post office, a lumber mill, a school, two churches, two general stores and around 55 homes that housed a population of more than 800 people. But catastrophe struck the next year when a devastating flood destroyed most of the town.
Today, it remains the most intact African-American settlement in the state. A restored schoolhouse serves as a museum and heritage learning center telling the story of early rural African American life. The Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., includes artifacts from the settlement.
MOVING ON
Black settlers who came to Indiana were able to buy land and avoid slavery, but that didn’t mean they were welcomed with open arms. Many white lawmakers and neighbors were aggressively anti-Black.
Some advocated for policies that would encourage Black Hoosiers to move to Africa. Others outright attacked the settlements, sometimes kidnapping residents and selling them into slavery in the South.
That racist sentiment took the form of two “very treacherous” policies in Indiana, explained Trotter with Indiana Landmarks.
In 1831, legislators approved a law requiring all Black residents to post a $500 bond – the equivalent of about $18,000 today – to stay in the state. Then, in 1851, a change in the Indiana constitution deemed it was unlawful for “any negro or mulatto to come into, settle in, or become an inhabitant of the state.” The Indiana Supreme Court invalidated that change in 1866.
Trotter argues Black settlers didn’t just start communities because of their shared cultural identity. They also served as way to survive the intense hostility from nearly everyone around them.
“Without the activism of many of the white residents of Indiana, it probably would have been an openly slave state,” Trotter explained. “We had a huge abolitionist community here in Indiana, and you’ll find that a lot of these settlements were also around areas where Quakers settled.”
But it wasn’t the state’s anti-Black policies or disdain from some white residents that ultimately led to the dissolution of rural Black settlements.
The promise of better jobs and a better life in the state’s rapidly developing cities in the early 1900s ultimately lured away many young residents, Trotter explained.
Older settlers who remained eventually died, and the communities dissolved as the land was sold off to farmers. Many settlements fell into disrepair and were eventually reclaimed by nature.
Even so, the legacy of those settlements lives on through the host of descendants from those early families, some of whom became prominent Hoosiers.
Matthias Nolcox was born in Lyles Station and served as the first principal of Indianapolis’ celebrated all-Black Crispus Attucks High School. George P. Stewart grew up in a settlement near Vincennes, according to Trotter, and went on to found the Indianapolis Reporter in 1895. Today, it’s the longest-running African- American newspaper in Indiana and fourth in the U.S.
“The impact of these people all over the state has been just tremendous,” Trotter said.
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