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The test was run for a Penn-seated case first, and its result is stated before the boundary case is told: no seizure, rescue, habeas hearing or fugitive proceeding seated in Penn Township or Osceola appears in the published Indiana appellate reports, in Chapman or Howard, or in the marker and survey record searched in November 2026. The documented case for this county exists, is famous, and stands on South Bend ground; it is told here whole, as boundary, from the record. David and Lucy Powell and their sons Lewis, George, James and Samuel were enslaved by John Norris of Boone County, Kentucky. On the night of October 9, 1847, the family escaped, reached Cass County, Michigan, settled at Cassopolis, bought land, and Lewis married. On September 27, 1849, Norris's party seized Lucy and the four sons at Cassopolis — David was not taken — bound Lewis's arms, and wagoned the family south, passing through South Bend early on September 28 and stopping one to two miles south of the village. There Sheriff Edwin B. Crocker and a crowd of one hundred to one hundred forty or more, some of them armed, intervened on a writ of habeas corpus. Probate Judge Elisha Egbert heard the matter at South Bend and discharged the Powells, Norris's return and proof of ownership being insufficient. Norris then proceeded under Indiana's fugitive statute, and the damages course that followed ran federally — its price is the next article's subject. The record carriers are of the first strength: Norris v. Newton et al., 5 McLean 92, 18 Federal Cases 322 (Case No. 10,307), Circuit Court for the District of Indiana, May Term 1850, in full text; Howard's county history, which gives the case its own section — vol. 1, chapter VI, “A Celebrated Case — Slavery, as Known in Indiana / Our Slave Case,” p. 202; and the modern scholarly telling, John C. Harvey, “The South Bend Fugitive Slave Case,” Hanover Historical Review (2017). Two appellate neighbours print as elsewhere, not here: Graves et al. v. State, 1 Ind. 258 (1850), the Bristol case in Elkhart County — the 1847 seizure of Thomas Harris, freed by a justice of the peace, the Kentuckians' 1848 riot convictions reversed in 1849 on Prigg v. Pennsylvania (Indiana Historical Bureau marker 20.2007.1) — and Donnell v. State, 3 Ind. 480 (1852), Decatur County, where a conviction for aiding Caroline and her four children was likewise reversed on Prigg (marker 16.2007.1). Verdict: the county's documented case is dug whole at boundary; for Penn Township ground the case test is a tested negative, printed in U·3 and U·4 at survey strength.
Sources: Norris v. Newton et al., 5 McLean 92 (C.C.D. Ind. 1850), full text at law.resource.org; Howard (1907), vol. 1, ch. VI §V, p. 202; Harvey, “The South Bend Fugitive Slave Case,” Hanover Historical Review (2017); Indiana Historical Bureau markers 20.2007.1 and 16.2007.1; Graves v. State, 1 Ind. 258; Donnell v. State, 3 Ind. 480. Read November 2026.