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Park listed 2007 · cemetery deeded 1854
The town's own listed place is a park most visitors drive past, and its most significant ground is a graveyard. North Liberty Park — seven acres at 309 North Jefferson Street, listed on the National Register in 2007 — is famous at the scale a Register listing confers: its WPA fieldstone entrances, footbridge and bandshell of 1935 and 1937 are the documented work, carried whole in the Architecture section. Porter-Rea Cemetery's fame runs on a different mechanism — significance argued in print. The Historical Bureau's 2003 marker, the state's virtual tour, a February 2026 television account and the park manager's quoted claim that it was "the first cemetery to include both free Blacks and Whites together" have made an unsegregated neighborhood burial ground of 1854 into the most written-about acre in the township; the claim of priority prints, as elsewhere in this build, as a quoted claim, and the integration itself as the marker's settled text. Between them the two sites divide the township's fame honestly: one for how it was built, one for who lies in it.