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FOUNDING IN CONFLICT (C118): THE 1854 DEED AGAINST BURIALS FROM 1845
Porter-Rea is the fullest cemetery file in the township — and its two official carriers date its beginning nine years apart. The ground (NE ¼, Sec. 25, T36N, R1E, inside Potato Creek State Park on SR 4; the county record's directions have visitors stop at the gate house and tell the ranger they are going to the cemetery) prints its founding whole (C118). The Indiana Historical Bureau's marker 71.2003.1 (installed 2003) reads: "This cemetery was officially created September 6, 1854 when Samuel Gard deeded land to trustees for a burial ground" — the deed itself cited (Deed Record 72, p. 625) — and records the Porter Cemetery Association formed 9 May 1884, with Black and white charter members. The Indiana DNR's state-parks page for the ground reads: "This small rural cemetery dates back to 1845. Nine-year-old Emma Porter was the first person to be buried here." Burial before deed would reconcile the two; that reconciliation is an inference and is labelled as one, not asserted. On both carriers the ground predates its association and was never a church's ground: it is the burial place of the Huggart Settlement, the free African-American settlement in Union Township (dug whole in Lakeville's build — pointer only here), whose Black residents lie alongside their white neighbours, not segregated, on both the marker's and the DNR's telling. The state's own radar study of its oldest part found neither Emma Porter's nor the Quaker graves — "among the oldest burials in Porter Rea Cemetery," their caskets probably decomposed. The ground today is active and independent: owned, managed, and maintained by the Porter Rea Cemetery Association, enclosed within the state park but expressly not purchased when the park land was acquired in the 1970s, and expanded a few times over the years. Its records are the association's own lot records (cited by the Historical Bureau), and its published reading is the county inscriptions volume at pp. 162–167 (a second citation form gives the lot records at pp. 162–176; both page ranges print as cited, the volume itself the settler). It is also the township's only state-marked ground — the heritage file carries the marking count.
IHB marker 71.2003.1 and its cited sources (secure.in.gov); Indiana DNR state-parks page for Porter Rea Cemetery (in.gov, November 2026); IHB Marker Text Review Report for the Huggart Settlement marker 71.1998.1 (2014); DNR Huggart Settlement research page (radar study); SBAGS locations file.