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Bought 28 January 1861 · the claim is Dakin's, 1899
What is documented is the mill, the abolitionist, and the lawsuit; the fugitives at the mill are one man's late telling. Solomon W. Palmer came to South Bend in the early 1840s already an abolitionist — in New York he had defended an anti-slavery speaker at risk of his life (Windle/Dakin) — and the court record itself places him in the county's UGRR history as a Powell-case defendant; he was later a South Bend councilman and sheriff of the county. He bought the Olive Branch sawmill on 28 January 1861 (Deed Record Book AB, pp. 425–26, via Karst) — the grantor is not named in Karst's footnote as read, a named gap whose settler is the deed itself. The claim comes from Esse B. Dakin, whose paper was read before the Northern Indiana Historical Society in 1899 and compiled by Helen Hibberd Windle in 1939. Karst's compression: Palmer "frequently noticed 'fugitives dodging about in the underbrush near the mill and once helped three escaping slaves to reach safety in Michigan.'" Windle's full text adds the telling's shape: driving home with his son, Palmer called three men to his wagon, fed and rested them behind locked doors and drawn shades, then drove them to Niles, where La Pierre put them on the train for Detroit and Canada; Dakin also claims a Palmer–John Brown correspondence and a household sitting darkened at the hour of Brown's execution — printed as Dakin's claims at the same strength, no Brown-letter carrier reached. Verdict: the purchase, the abolitionism, and the Powell role are documented; the rescue prints as Dakin's claim, a single late carrier writing forty to fifty years after, with two cautions in print: Windle does not date the rescue, and Palmer bought this mill in January 1861, on the war's eve — no carrier dates any fugitive sighting at the Olive Branch mill to before or after the purchase, so the rescue cannot be assigned to the mill's Palmer ownership on the record reached; and no second carrier for a station at the mill was found. Ten miles south of South Bend is this township's ground — the geography is consistent, and consistency is all the record gives.
The Palmer thread's later record stands in the same articles: lk-digi-ugrr-second-discharge, lk-digi-ugrr-defendants, and lk-digi-ugrr-supreme-court (assembly pointer, DELTA-I-1).