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ROW 302 · LEG 50 ITEM 8 · TESTED NOVEMBER 2026
The instrument and its limits, stated first: United States patent faces record no race, which is why the record of Black invention exists at all only through Henry E. Baker, the Patent Office examiner who from the 1880s compiled the first lists of African American patentees — 370 names by 1900, over 800 by his 1913 The Colored Inventor (the USPTO's own published account). The search for this ground therefore runs by name: the names the ground's own record gives, checked against Baker's tradition and against the patent rolls themselves.
The names this ground gives, and their results. Penn Township's own census lines frame the search: the Seventh and Eighth Censuses return no free coloured residents in Penn in 1850 or 1860 (the county's entire returned free coloured population of 1850, twenty-nine people, lay on other townships' lines), and the township's first non-zero coloured count in the published tables is thirteen in 1870 — on the Penn-including-Mishawaka form, so not separable to this ground (Population, banked). No Black resident of the town or township is named as an inventor, mechanic, or patentee in Chapman, Howard, the 1875 atlas, or Kiracofe as read for this build. The county's one named early Black settlement, the Huggart Settlement (Samuel and Andrew Huggart, their families, and several other African-American households, c. 1850–1890s), stands in Union Township, not Penn — boundary ground, named here because it is the only by-name test the county affords: the Huggart names were run against the patent record and Baker's lists, and no invention patent for any of them was found. The one "patent" on Samuel Huggart's own record is printed because it is the trap this search exists to disarm: it is a federal land patent — eighty acres applied for September 11, 1834, issued March 20, 1837 — a General Land Office instrument, not a patent of invention. For the modern era the same limit binds in reverse: with faces carrying no race, a present-day Black inventor of this ground could be found only if some other record named him as one, and none reached does. Closure: TESTED NEGATIVE — the by-name search run on every name this ground and its county afford, against Baker's lists and the patent rolls, returns no Black inventor of Osceola or Penn Township; the negative is printed with its instrument (Baker's tradition) and its structural limits (zero returned Black population in Penn in 1850–60; faces that record no race) stated on its face.
Sources: USPTO, "Found on Baker's list" and "Beyond Baker's list" (the Baker instrument and its counts); Henry E. Baker, The Colored Inventor (1913), as the list's published form, searched by name as reached; Indiana Historical Bureau, Huggart Settlement marker text review report 71.1998.1 (2014), and Frederick Karst, "A Rural Black Settlement in St. Joseph County, Indiana, Before 1900," Indiana Magazine of History (the Union Township seat, the families, the 1834–37 land patent); Population (banked) for the 1850, 1860, and 1870 Penn census lines; Chapman, Howard, and the 1875 atlas as read in the banked Notable People.