The Hanna Addition settlement · the first families

1830s – 1850s

A community with surnames: The Indiana Historical Society's survey of early Black settlements records no antebellum Black rural settlement cluster in Allen County — but an urban one: in Fort Wayne's Hanna Addition, the plat Samuel Hanna laid out east of the original town, a Black settlement formed that the Society, following Kirby, calls the first African American community in Allen County, comprising as many as thirty families in the census of 1850. Its major family names, as the Society gives them, were Canada, Elliot — originally from North Carolina — and Fisher, originally from Ohio. The federal census of 1850 counted 81 free "colored" residents in the city of Fort Wayne and 102 in all of Allen County — 1.9 percent of the city — and the county's historians caution that even that small count likely undercounts the community. These were free settlers and freedom seekers together, families forming since the 1830s under a state law that from 1831 required every Black newcomer to register with the county clerk and post a $500 bond for good behavior. The settlement's collective acts are its biography. In 1849, when the Indiana Colonization Society circulated an appeal inviting Indiana's Black residents to emigrate to Liberia, Fort Wayne's Black community answered with what the Indiana Historical Bureau calls "an extremely strong denunciation of African colonization," preserved in the society's own annual report — the same year the community founded its first church (next entries). The road the freedom seekers traveled, and the one documented station house that still stands, are told in the Underground Railroad section; what belongs here is that the people who settled were not passing through. They were founding.

Sources:

1. Indiana Historical Society, "Early Black Settlements by County" (Allen County) — the Hanna Addition settlement, as many as 30 families in the 1850 census; the Canada, Elliot and Fisher families; after J. Randolph Kirby's Old Fort News studies.
2. U.S. Census of 1850 — 81 free "colored" persons in Fort Wayne and 102 in Allen County, via Charles R. Poinsatte, Fort Wayne During the Canal Era, 1828–1855, as cited in Peggy Seigel, "The Fort Wayne Standard," Indiana Magazine of History XCVII (September 2001), which also carries the undercount caution. The census term is quoted as the census printed it.
3. Indiana Historical Bureau, "Indiana Colonization Efforts" (Indiana Historian, March 2000) — the 1849 Fort Wayne denunciation of colonization, preserved in the Indiana Colonization Society's eleventh annual report and in Emma Lou Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana (1957).
4. Indiana Historical Bureau, "The 1851 Indiana Constitution" — the 1831 registration and $500 bond law.