The Huggart Settlement's School — Olive Branch

1850s – 1890

The children of the township's free Black settlement attended the district school at Olive Branch — a largely white school — and no carrier names a separate settlement school. The record stands first-hand in Frederick A. Karst's "A Rural Black Settlement in St. Joseph County, Indiana, Before 1900," Indiana Magazine of History 74 (September 1978), p. 257: "The Huggart children also attended a largely white school at Olive Branch" — the footnote sourcing the statement to the 1850 census and November 1975 interviews with Lydia Mae Easterday and Charles Bowers. Karst adds that the last school building at Olive Branch was constructed in June 1890 and later served as a farm shed, and that Andrew Huggart was superintendent of a union Sunday school at Olive Branch for many years. The state's own carriers agree at their strength: the Indiana Historical Bureau's marker review for the Huggart Settlement marker (71.1998.1, 2014) reviews as accurate the text "Settlement families attended nearby schools and churches and worked with neighbors in surrounding areas," and the Department of Natural Resources' settlement pages state that residents "attended church and school with their white neighbors" and that "Andrew's children attended the Olive Branch school, too." Karst's legal-context footnote frames the attendance: in pre-Civil War Indiana, school attendance for Black children was permitted but not required; a few white schools allowed Black children to attend while most did not; separate Black schools were few; and in 1869 the General Assembly made official provision for the education of Black children and made Black owners' property subject to the school tax (citing Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana). The settlement's whole course is LK-2's Black History; this article carries only its school record, at the same strength.