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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 Terre Haute and in October 1860 bought 120 acres adjoining the Huggarts' (Daniel M. Shively to Benjamin Bass, 23 October 1860, Deed Record Book AB, p. 190), with forty more in Union Township in 1861 and other land besides; his sons-in-law — Noah Boone, who married Amanda Bass at Vigo County on 17 June 1858, and Hardy Manuel, who married Eliza Bass on 8 January 1858 and, after her death, her sister Janetta on 27 May 1866 — took settlement land from his holding. How they took it prints whole, for the carriers divide: Karst carries direct sales — Boone in 1860, Manual in 1861, forty acres each, with twenty more apiece in 1876 "although in the latter case not directly from Bass"; the Bureau's review carries the 1876 chain only — Bass to Crocker and Simpson on 3 June 1876, and from them twenty acres each to Boone and Manuel on 11 August 1876 (Deed Record Book 56, pp. 344, 517, 518). Hardy Manuel, a carpenter who had worked in South Bend, built a log house on a high point of the section that still stands — used in Karst's day as a maple-syrup evaporator house, and perhaps, Karst writes, the only recognisable log building of early construction still in use in the county; the 1996 University of Notre Dame archaeological investigation of its site (12 SJ337) found no mid-nineteenth-century artefacts and concluded the cabin had been moved from elsewhere on the property. A mile away stood the Olive Branch sawmill of Solomon W. Palmer, the county's foremost abolitionist, who bought it on 28 January 1861 (Deed Record Book AB, pp. 425–26); Karst calls the proximity coincidence, and records Esse B. Dakin's account that Palmer noticed fugitives near the mill and once helped three escaping people to safety in Michigan — the Underground Railroad thread of this ground, which the branch pass of that name digs whole in its own place.
The community's size is a count and an estimate, and they print as what they are: the 1880 census counted twenty-eight people the schedule marked "mulatto" in six households — Samuel Huggart the nephew, Wesley Huggart, Efferson Manuel, Andrew Huggart, Noah Boone and Hardy Manual — while Karst's estimate, as the Bureau's review reports it, is "about thirty people" at the settlement's most populous, about 1880; the 1890 census that would have tested the course was destroyed in the Commerce Department fire of 10 January 1921. The daily record the carriers give is of integration at farm scale: shared threshing and butchering with mostly white neighbours, meals taken in each other's houses, children in the same school, families in the same churches — and Karst's explanation, from the settlement's own scale, that it "posed no economic threat to whites and thus allowed residents to be judged as individuals rather than by stereotypes." The end came in sales: Manuel and Jeanette sold out in 1885, James Huggart in 1887, Noah and Zipporah Boone in 1888; Wesley moved to South Bend about 1890; Jane died 28 January 1890; and on 23 September 1893 the Huggart heirs sold the original eighty acres to Lars and Nicoline Andreasen. Karst's closing sentence for the community is kept whole: when the last of the Huggarts left Union Township, their friends and neighbours held "a sad but festive farewell gathering" in their honour. By 1900 Andrew's three sons were in South Bend — Wesley a toolmaker at the Birdsell Manufacturing Company, James a labourer, Samuel a teamster — and the settlement itself was, in Karst's word, lost sight of, until his 1970s interviews with descendants of pioneers, checked against the census and the deed books, brought it back.