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Black History — Lakeville
The deepest human story this township carries after its first peoples is a Black one, and it stands northwest of the town, not in it. In September 1834 — the same season the county's first white settlements were a year old — a free Black man born in Virginia walked into the United States land office at La Porte and bought eighty acres of Union Township at the government's minimum price. Around his purchase, and his brother's, there grew a small farming settlement of Black families that lasted some sixty years, worshipped and schooled and was buried beside its white neighbours, sent its sons into the county's land records as owners, and then, in the 1890s, sold out and was forgotten — until a newspaper editor dug it back out of the census and the deed books in the 1970s. This section digs that settlement whole, as the forward plan assigns it: it is the Black History leg's township anchor, and the rest of that leg's course for this ground is assigned to its own later pass.
The ground: Section 29, northwest Union Township
1834–1890s
Township ground, bounded on four sides by named roads. The settlement was confined, in Frederick Karst's account, to one section of land: Section 29, Township 36 North, Range 2 East, in the northwest corner of Union Township…
Samuel Huggart: the 1834 purchase
1834–1872
The first land purchase, at the government's minimum, by a Black man in this county's south. Samuel Huggart was a son of Moses Huggart of Rockbridge County, Virginia, whose household the 1810 census listed as seven free nonwhite…
Andrew Huggart: the brother who farmed it
1816–1881
Shoemaker, farmer, Sunday-school superintendent — and, by his obituary, the county's first Black candidate for office. Andrew Huggart was born in Virginia in 1816, learned the shoemaker's trade, moved at twenty to Dayton and…
Two obituaries, eleven days apart — and the "first colored man" line
October 1881
The settlement's most quoted sentence belongs to one paper, and the record keeps the papers separate. Andrew Huggart's death drew two obituaries in two South Bend papers, and a reader who follows only one carrier will…
The settlement whole: four surnames, a peak, a dispersal
c. 1850–1893
Huggart, Bass, Boone, Manuel — a farming community counted in households, then gone. Four surnames carry the settlement: Huggart, Bass, Boone and Manuel. Benjamin Bass, born in 1801 in Guilford, North Carolina, came by way of…
The law over the settlement, at anchor size
1831–1851
The frame the Historical Bureau's review itself gives — no larger. The settlement was planted inside a legal frame built to discourage it, and the Bureau's review states that frame at a size this article does not enlarge (the…
Porter-Rea Cemetery: the burying ground
1845 / 1854–present
Integrated from its first years, independent to this day — and Liberty Township's ground, pointed to, not taken. The settlement's dead lie about two miles west, in Porter-Rea Cemetery — inside Potato Creek State Park but not of…
The marker: 71.1998.1
1998
Sixty-five words at the section's corner, a century after the farewell. The state marked the settlement in 1998, Indiana Historical Bureau marker 71.1998.1. It stands at the northwestern corner of the junction of State Road 4 (Pierce Road) and Mulberry Road, east of Potato Creek State Park, in Union Township — the settlement section's southern and eastern bounds meeting at its corner. Its text is printed whole: "First land purchased by Huggart brothers in 1834; area settled and farmed by their families and several other African-American households circa 1850–1890s. Settlement families attended nearby schools and churches and worked with neighbors in surrounding areas. Many residents were buried in nearby Porter-Rea Cemetery now in Potato Creek State Park." The Bureau's 2014 review of the text found it accurate.
The names as the record spells them
1834–present
Huggart on the stones; the variants ride along, printed, never silently normalised. The family's name was spelled Huggart, Huggard, Huggert and Hughart across the record; the gravestones at Porter-Rea read Huggart , and that form…
Black History: What the Record Does Not Carry
As of November 2026
The anchor is dug; the leg is not finished, and its unfinished parts are named. this section carries the Black History leg's township anchor at the depth the reached record allows. It does not carry, and does not pretend to: the…
The banked Black-history file carries the settlement whole: its founding, its deeds, its church and school, its obituaries and its archaeology. This addendum works this section's analytical limbs — who wrote the settlement's history and in what voice, where its people went, what the Klan era and the exclusion record show, the institutions that never stood, the counter-move the settlement itself was, its professional record, and the four remaining limbs stated each at its own strength.
Who wrote it: Karst's study, its exact citation, and the community's own voice
Indiana Magazine of History 74 (September 1978), cited exactly; community-written record tested whole
The settlement's history was written by an outside scholar working from the community's own mouths, and both halves of that sentence matter — the citation prints exactly, and the search for a community-written study prints its…
The dispersal, whole: 1885–1900, the sales, the sons, and the South Bend door
Banked Black History lk-huggart-settlement and lk-huggart-obituaries, read as a dispersal course
The sales: between 1885 and 1893 the settlement's ground left the founding families' hands, the last of the founding deeds being the heirs' sale of the original eighty acres on 23 September 1893, to Lars and Nicoline Andreasen, a…
The Klan-era test: no Union Township item in any carrier reached
Press and journal record swept for Union Township, 1921–1925,; banked this history as the frame
Indiana's 1920s Klan was a mass movement with a statehouse, and the test is whether it touched this township in the record — it did not, at any strength reached, and the negative prints with its searches and its settler. The…
The institutions that never stood
Named gap — settlers current, November 2026; banked Black History as the standing institutional record
The settlement built a church and sent its children to a school; the forms the checklist names beyond those — a settlement house, a chapter, a case — stand in no carrier reached, and the item is banked as a named gap with its…
Exclusion, measured at what the record can measure
Banked Culture pool record and the Green Book editions sampled; full edition run as residue
Exclusion prints in this build only where it can be measured, and two measurements stand: the town never built the facility the era's exclusions governed, and the era's travellers' guide never printed the town. The first…
Redlining: no covenant, no survey, no developer — a named gap
Named gap — settlers current, November 2026
The word redlining appears nowhere in the build's mirror, and nothing beneath the word was reached either — no covenant text, no federal survey, no developer's line — so the item is banked as a named gap, with the instruments…
The counter-move, dated: buying land under a constitution that forbade coming
Banked this history and Black History, read together as the counter-move series
The checklist's counter-move forms belong to the twentieth century's cities; Lakeville's counter-move is older, and it is the settlement itself — Black families buying Indiana farmland, at law, in the decades when Indiana's Black…
The professional record: no Black physician, nurse or hospital worker named
Banked physician benches and the settlement record, read for the professional classes
The town's medical benches are full and none of them is identified as Black in any carrier — and the settlement's own people worked the land and a trade, not the professions, on every record reached. The benches: Lakeville's…
Four limbs, each at its own strength: firsts, the Black press, renewal, reparations
Banked Black History (obituaries), this history and Wars & Military Service, read limb by limb
The leg's last shortfall row bundles four limbs, and they close at four different strengths — one carried, three negative at reached strength — and the article states them separately so no strength borrows from another. Firsts…