The small-community cultural record: Black and Latino life in Olive Township

The small-community cultural record

Lead: This article prints the small-community cultural record of Olive Township at documented strength, and its first duty is a boundary: the county's documented nineteenth-century rural Black settlement is not this township's.

Frederick A. Karst's study in the Indiana Magazine of History, built from census schedules, land records and descendants' testimony, documents the Huggart settlement — Samuel Huggart, born in Virginia, buying land through the La Porte land office from 1834, his family forming the nucleus of a small Black farm settlement in Union Township, northwest of Lakeville, east of the Potato Creek ground, which reached its maximum size about 1880, when twenty-eight people were counted in the census under the term that record uses, and which had disappeared by the 1890s. Members of the Powell family of that settlement were among the founders of South Bend's Olivet AME Church, formed in 1870 and for many years the only African American congregation in St. Joseph County. All of that is St. Joseph County's record, and South Bend's and Union Township's to tell; it is printed here, at pointer strength, precisely so it is not quietly relocated into Olive Township, where no equivalent settlement, congregation, press or society record was found in the searches run for this row. For Olive Township itself, the reachable record is thin and is printed thin: the township's present population is overwhelmingly white in the census-derived figures in circulation, with a Black population counted in the dozens, and this section found no Olive Township Black church, lodge, newspaper, school society or named Black farm family carried in the congregational, press or society records searched online — a named want, printed as such: the township schedules and the town papers' full runs, read name by name, are the instruments that would give this part of the record its names. The Latino record is thinner still in print. The township's farm and plant generations plainly include Latino labour — the Terre Coupee farm economy and the industrial ground at the township's edge did not run without it — but the searches run for this row returned no named Latino congregation, business, society, festival or family in Olive Township from a carrier that documents it at printable strength, and this article will not manufacture one from demography. What the record does not hold is stated as the finding: for Latino cultural life in this township, the documented carriers — parish registers beyond the Polish parish's own telling, school enrolment and programme records, and the South Bend press's township coverage read whole — remain the named want. The Polish parish, St. Stanislaus Kostka at Terre Coupee, is this township's documented ethnic cultural house, and it is banked and told in its own place in this build; it is pointed to here, not retold, and it does not stand in for records it is not.

Sources:

1. Karst, Frederick A., “A Rural Black Settlement in St. Joseph County, Indiana, before 1900,” Indiana Magazine of History (ScholarWorks, Indiana University) — Huggart settlement, Union Township; 1834 land purchase; c. 1880 maximum; disappearance in the 1890s.
2. Indiana Landmarks, “Olivet AME Church Serves as Historic Community Cornerstone” (2022) — formed 1870; Powell family founders from the Huggart Settlement; first and for many years only African American congregation in St. Joseph County (South Bend).
3. Olive Township demographic summaries in circulation (census / American Community Survey derived) — Black population counted in the dozens; printed at that strength only.