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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 officially created on 6 September 1854, when Samuel Gard deeded land to trustees for a burial ground — the deed is cited to Deed Record 72, page 625 — and free African-American settlers from Huggart Settlement were buried there alongside their white neighbors, not segregated. The Porter Cemetery Association, formed 9 May 1884, had both white and African-American charter members. The cemetery was always a neighborhood burial ground for members of churches of various denominations, never one congregation's yard; it has been called Porter Rea for decades, perhaps because both Porter and Rea families owned adjacent land. Enclosed in Potato Creek State Park, it remains an active, independent cemetery managed by the Porter Cemetery Association. A stronger claim circulates — the park's property manager is quoted in 2026 calling it "the first cemetery to include both free Blacks and Whites together" — and it prints here as a quoted claim, at quote strength, not as a finding of this section: the marker's own text, which is the settled record, claims the integration, not the priority.