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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 afterwards to Miami County, Ohio, and in 1839 married Jane Clark, a native of Amherst County, Virginia. His arrival on his brother's land prints three ways, and the Historical Bureau's review itself lays the three side by side, unmerged: the St. Joseph Valley Weekly Register dated it to the fall of 1848; the South Bend Tribune said only that he had been "a resident of Union Township for 32 years" at his death on 30 September 1881, which puts the arrival in 1849; the 1880 county history gave 1850. The 1850 census — the first to carry the family — shows the household of seven: Andrew; Jane; their children Wesley, Mary, James and Sarah; and Samuel. How many children the couple had in all prints whole: the Register obituary, as the Bureau's review reports it, says six, five living to adulthood and four outliving him; Karst and the DNR name five — Wesley, Mary and James born in Ohio, Sarah and Samuel born in Indiana — and Chapman's 1880 sketch of Andrew names the same five, the youngest Samuel M., born 23 June 1852.
Andrew prospered at farming — an 1880 county directory valued his eighty acres at $2,030 — and worked winters at his first trade, repairing neighbours' shoes. He joined the Sumption Prairie church, three miles northwest of the farm, and for many years was superintendent of a union Sunday school at Olive Branch, where his children attended the largely white school alongside white children. The land descended in the record: Wesley bought forty acres from his parents and uncle — 1865 in Karst and the DNR, the deed itself dated 13 April 1866 (Deed Record Book 34, p. 303) in the Bureau's review; James bought a like farm — 1873 in the DNR and by Karst's "eight years later," the deed dated 11 April 1874 (Deed Record Book 52, p. 214). Andrew died on Friday, 30 September 1881, of a "protracted ailment diagnosed as 'dropsy of the heart'" — probably, Karst notes, what would now be called congestive heart failure. His will of 23 October 1875, with a codicil of 8 September 1881, divided the remaining farm between his son Samuel, his daughter Sarah Manuel, and his grandson Lorenzo Boon, subject to Jane's occupancy for her life; Jane died 28 January 1890.