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1831–1866, and the county frame
Indiana law spent the town's founding decades telling Black families not to come, and Liberty Township's censuses are what obedience to that law looked like. The state's Black Laws required registration and bonding of Black residents; the Constitution of 1851 went further — Article XIII forbade Black immigration into Indiana altogether and voided contracts made with those who came, a settlement regime struck down only after the Civil War (the Underground Railroad branch of this build carries the law whole). Settlement under that regime in this county happened where work and numbers made it possible: in South Bend, whose Black history — the Powell freedom case of 1847–49, Olivet A.M.E., the Allen lawyers, the pool fight, the commercial district — is carried whole in that city's build and is the county's record. Liberty Township, a farm township organised in 1837 with no factory until a wagon works and no railroad until late, offered neither the jobs nor the critical mass, and no named Black family of the antebellum or Jim Crow generations was found settled here in the county histories, census summaries or press reached. Named individuals may stand in the census manuscripts themselves; that read stands as this section's first named gap, its settler the 1850–1940 census manuscripts for Liberty Township, household by household.