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Communities — North Liberty
North Liberty's communities have mostly lived at township scale, on farms rather than streets, and the deepest documented one was not in the town at all. Two miles from the plat, in the ground that is now Potato Creek State Park, free Black families from Virginia and North Carolina farmed alongside white and Quaker neighbors from 1834 into the 1890s, schooled and worshipped with them, and were buried beside them in an unsegregated cemetery — while the town that grew up next door stayed, on every count the record reaches, almost entirely white. This section carries each community at the size its record actually is.
The Huggart Settlement: the first community, whole
1834 – c. 1890s
The first land purchase was in 1834, and it was made by free Black brothers. The Indiana Historical Bureau's marker review (71.1998.1, reviewed 17 March 2014) carries the text the state stands behind: "First land purchased by…
Porter-Rea: the community's burial ground, unsegregated from 1854
6 September 1854 – present
A cemetery is where a community's membership is finally written down, and this one was written without a colour line. The Historical Bureau's Porter (Rea) Cemetery marker (71.2003.1, installed 2003) reads: the cemetery was…
The farm communities of Liberty Township: Brethren, German, Quaker threads
1830s – 1952
Around the town plat, the township's communities organized themselves by congregation and kin, and the record reaches them at that scale. The Church of the Brethren thread is the best documented: Lawrence Shultz's History of the…
The town community, and the boundary honesty the record requires
1836 – 2020
The town plat and the settlement are neighbours on the map and opposites in the counts, and this section prints both facts in one article on purpose. The town the censuses count was, in 1960 and 1970, recorded with zero Black…
Communities today, dated November 2026
As of November 2026
The newest community in the record is a change in the census lines, not a named arrival. Between 2000 and 2020 the town's Hispanic or Latino share rose from 0.71 to 2.5 to 4.3 percent — 69 people at the last count — and the…