The county frame: the Huggart Settlement is not Mishawaka's

1834 – 1890s

The county's earliest Black settlement stood in the south county, and this entry prints the boundary so the Mishawaka file neither claims it nor loses it: Frederick A. Karst's article in the Indiana Magazine of History, read first-hand, documents the Huggart Settlement: Samuel Huggart bought eighty acres at the La Porte land office on 11 September 1834, his patent issuing 20 March 1837, and a rural Black settlement grew on that ground in Union Township, northwest of Lakeville — the south of St. Joseph County, a day's journey from Mishawaka's rapids and never part of this city or its township. The settlement peaked about 1880 with twenty-eight people the census counted as "mulattoes," and disintegrated in the early 1890s. Samuel's brother Andrew Huggart, who arrived in the fall of 1848, was described in his South Bend Tribune obituary of 1 October 1881 as the first Black person to seek public office in St. Joseph County; the office itself the record does not determine. The settlement's families lie in Porter-Rea Cemetery, now inside Potato Creek State Park, under state marker 71.1998.1. The settlement belongs whole to St. Joseph County's own leg when the county is built; it is printed here because a reader of Mishawaka's record will meet its name, and its ground is not Mishawaka's.

One conflict is carried whole: Indiana Landmarks' 2022 articles on Olivet A.M.E. state that the Powell family established the Huggart Settlement. Karst's article — the scholarly source, read first-hand — does not establish any Powell–Huggart link in the pages read, and the county scholarship Karst cites (Martha Merrill, "St. Joseph County's Black Pioneers: A Survey," The Old Courthouse News, Fall 1969, and Gordon's 1922 study) is the route by which the claim would be tested. The link is not asserted in this record. If it were proven, Mishawaka's first family would also be the county settlement's founders; on the record reached, the Powells' documented beginning is Farrow's in South Bend and Elijah's here in 1868, and that is what this section prints.

Sources

1. Frederick A. Karst, "A Rural Black Settlement in St. Joseph County, Indiana, before 1900," Indiana Magazine of History — read first-hand: the 1834 purchase and 1837 patent; Union Township, northwest of Lakeville; the c.1880 peak of twenty-eight; the early-1890s disintegration; Andrew Huggart's 1881 obituary; the Merrill (1969) and Gordon (1922) citations.
2. Indiana Historical Marker 71.1998.1 (Huggart Settlement) — Porter-Rea Cemetery, now in Potato Creek State Park.
3. Indiana Landmarks (2022), the Olivet A.M.E. articles — the Powell-established-Huggart claim, printed as a conflict against Karst and not asserted.