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Porter-Rea Cemetery: the burying ground

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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 it: when the park's land was bought in the 1970s, the cemetery was not purchased, and it remains an active, independent cemetery managed by the Porter Cemetery Association (formed 9 May 1884, with white and African-American charter members), enclosed in the park in Liberty Township. Its own record prints its two dates whole, for they answer different questions: the DNR dates the ground to 1845, when nine-year-old Emma Porter was the first person buried there; its marker text (Indiana Historical Bureau 71.2003.1, installed 2003, dedicated 13 September 2003) dates its official creation to 6 September 1854, when Samuel Gard deeded land to trustees for a burial ground (Deed Record 72, p. 625). The marker's words for the burials are kept: free African-American settlers from the Huggart Settlement were buried here "alongside their white neighbors, not segregated." The cemetery's whole course belongs to the cemeteries leg (LK-6) and to its own ground's build; it stands here at pointer size, as the settlement's other half.

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Source: Porter-Rea Cemetery: the burying ground, Moosed History by Project Moosed, https://history.projectmoosed.com/usa/midwest/indiana/lakeville/black-history/porter-rea-cemetery-the-burying-ground-at-pointer-size/