Black women's organizing, at tested size

BRANCH · WOMEN'S HISTORY · OLIVE TOWNSHIP — A TESTED NEGATIVE WITH ITS BOUNDARY

Lead:The instruments searched were the county histories and church record, the Olivet A.M.E. record and nomination file, the Huggart Settlement scholarship, and the state parks and historical bureau accounts of Black settlement in this county. None places a Black church, society or women's organization in Olive Township or New Carlisle.

The boundary is exact, and it corrects an easy error. The county's first Black settlement, the Huggart Settlement, was not here: it stood in Union Township, in the county's south, where Samuel Huggart patented eighty acres in 1834 and the settlement of Huggart, Bass and Powell families peaked at about twenty-eight people around 1880 before disappearing in the 1890s. Its families attended nearby schools and churches alongside their neighbors — the marker and scholarship record integrated worship, not a separate Black congregation — and Andrew Huggart was superintendent of a Sunday school at the Olive Branch United Brethren Church in 1881; Olive Branch is a Union Township place-name, not Olive Township, and the resemblance is a trap this article declines. The county's Black congregational seat is South Bend's: Olivet A.M.E., organized in 1870, the first African American congregation in St. Joseph County and for many years the only center of its social and political life, founded in part by Powell family members of the Huggart Settlement. Black women's organizing at county grain runs through that congregation and the county seat; at town grain it is, on the record reached, a true negative. Its settler, if the record exists, is the Olivet A.M.E. archive and the county's Black history collections, not this township's books.

Sources:

1. Frederick A. Karst, “A Rural Black Settlement in St. Joseph County, Indiana, before 1900,” Indiana Magazine of History — Huggart Settlement in Union Township, peak size, disintegration in the 1890s.
2. Indiana Historical Bureau, Huggart Settlement marker text review (71.1998.1, 2014), and Indiana DNR State Parks, Huggart Settlement pages — 1834 patent, settlement families, schools and churches, Andrew Huggart's Sunday school superintendency.
3. Indiana Landmarks, “Olivet AME Church Serves as Historic Community Cornerstone” (2022), and the Lowell Heights–Olivet A.M.E. National Register staff report (2020) — Olivet organized 1870, first Black congregation in the county, Powell-family founders.