The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
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 Church of the Brethren in Indiana (1952) traces a congregation whose territory once covered much of the county's southwest, worshipping in two houses — the North Liberty house, purchased from another denomination in 1903, and Oak Grove — under one organization until the separation of 1917 made North Liberty its own congregation, served for long stretches by farmer-ministers under the free-ministry plan, among them Daniel Hartman, who ministered at Oak Grove, North Liberty and First South Bend and died in January 1920. German threads run through the township's biography record in Howard's 1907 county history — German Lutheran and German Baptist households among the farm families, the Gushwa family among them — but no German street, parish-as-mother or enclave geography exists to print for a farm township, and none is drawn. The Quaker thread is documented by its effect — the anti-slavery community around the Huggart Settlement — rather than by a meeting house roll in the carriers reached; a meeting-by-meeting Quaker record for Liberty Township stands as a named gap, its settler the Indiana Yearly Meeting records and the county histories read at township level.