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 persons; the family name, Karst reports, was apparently taken from a white family of the Big Calfpasture River. On 11 September 1834 Samuel applied at the La Porte land office for a patent on eighty acres — the east half of the northwest quarter of Section 29, T36N R2E — and paid $100, or $1.25 an acre, the minimum price for the minimum purchase under the federal land law of 1820. The record of the transaction stands at three removes and all three agree: La Porte Cash Certificate Number 2986 in the Bureau of Land Management's records (Record Group 49); the patent itself, issued 20 March 1837 and recorded 13 February 1856 at Deed Record Book V, pages 621–22, in the county Recorder's office; and the General Land Office's certification of it in 1853, which Karst suggests was needed because Samuel did not settle on the land at once. Where he came from is the record's first open seam, and it prints whole: the Historical Bureau's review says he lived at the purchase in Miami County, Ohio; Karst and the DNR both say Montgomery County, Ohio. The two are not merged here.

When Samuel himself reached the land is bracketed, not dated: Andrew's obituary places him in the region as early as 1835; no Huggart appears in the county's census until 1850, when Samuel stands in his brother's household, where the censuses of 1850, 1860 and 1870 all show him — unmarried, a bachelor living with Andrew's family, his occupation "farmer." In 1852 he was serving on a committee of the Sumption Prairie Baptist Church planning a new place of worship — the item carried by Karst citing Chapman's 1880 county history (p. In 1858 he deeded half his interest in the farm to Andrew; in 1863 the brothers jointly bought the adjoining eighty acres (John R. Copeland to Samuel and Andrew Huggart, 8 April 1863, Deed Record Book A6, p. 188). His death prints at the strength each carrier gives it: Karst, from his gravestone in Porter Cemetery, gives the full date — 21 December 1872, aged sixty-eight — and the DNR repeats it; the Historical Bureau's review prints the year only, 1872. With his death Andrew took sole ownership, completing it through quit-claim deeds from Samuel's other heirs in Ohio and Iowa.