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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 Huggart brothers in 1834; area settled and farmed by their families and several other African-American households circa 1850–1890s. Settlement families attended nearby schools and churches and worked with neighbors in surrounding areas. Many residents were buried in nearby Porter-Rea Cemetery now in Potato Creek State Park." The review's working adds the particulars: Samuel Huggart purchased eighty acres in 1834; the Huggarts, born in Virginia, were among the first Black residents of St. Joseph County in the census record; most of the other settlement families came from North Carolina; the families intermarried — Huggart, Boone, Bass and Manuel are the names the cemetery record joins — and formed a small rural community of free Black households related by blood or marriage. Samuel Huggart died in 1872, his brother Andrew in 1881. One cabin associated with the settlement, the Hardy Manuel cabin, still stands, on the review's record.
The settlement sat inside a wider anti-slavery world. The state's own pioneers history describes the Huggart Settlement as part of a community of anti-slavery Quakers who played a part in the movement to abolish slavery, and the settlement families' children attended nearby schools — a descendant and local historian, Jan Shupert, is quoted in WNDU's February 2026 account pointing to the integrated school the families helped build at Olive Branch. All of this was built under an Indiana legal order that restricted Black residents' rights — the state's own summary says so plainly — which is what makes the settlement's ordinary course, land bought and held for two generations, the fact that matters.