The first families of record · settlement under the Black Laws

1839 – 1900

Present from the beginning, on paper that tried to bar them: Indiana's first constitution banned slavery in 1816, but the state the first Black South Benders entered barred Black men from voting, juries, office, the militia and the practice of law, required proof of freedom to reside legally, and in its 1851 constitution prohibited any "negro or mulatto" from coming into or settling in the state at all — fining anyone who employed them. They came anyway. The federal census counted nine Black residents of St. Joseph County in 1840 and twenty-nine in 1850; a city count put eighteen in South Bend itself in 1850. The first permanent Black resident of South Bend is believed to be Peter Coleman, who settled in the city in 1839.

The Garrett Smith family was the first Black family known to have owned property in the city; in 1849 they owned the first brick home in South Bend. Farrow Powell and his wife Rebecca Maria (Bass) Powell — no relation to the fugitive Powells of the next entry — moved to South Bend in the 1850s, purchased a home on Main Street in 1858, and established the Huggart Settlement, remembered as the first community of free Blacks in St. Joseph County. James Washington, a barber, was a prominent citizen of that era and, in the Commission's words, a significant member of the Underground Railroad. Black barbers served Black and white customers in the city from the 1860s. Most early Black residents worked as farm laborers and general laborers, with a small number self-employed.

By 1890 the county's Black population had reached the low hundreds — the federal census counted 340 in the county, a South Bend census 572 in the city — and through the whole nineteenth century the community stayed under two percent of the whole, worshipping in the church it founded in 1870 (below) and burying its dead in City Cemetery, integrated since its founding, where Farrow and Rebecca Powell lie. The Commission's judgment on these decades is the one the record supports: other early residents were certainly here "whose stories have been lost."

Sources:

1. City of South Bend, Final Report of the Reparatory Justice Commission (filed 5 March 2026), "History of Racial Discrimination in South Bend," Part I — the 1840 and 1850 county counts, the 1890 figures, Peter Coleman (1839), the Garrett Smith family, the Powell family of Main Street, James Washington, and the state Black Laws' catalogue.
2. IU South Bend Civil Rights Heritage Center, African American Landmark Tour, courthouse and City Cemetery chapters — the city's eighteen Black residents in 1850; Farrow and Rebecca Powell among the first Black families, buried in City Cemetery.
3. Indiana Landmarks, "Olivet AME Church Serves as Historic Community Cornerstone" (15 June 2022) — the Powells' Huggart Settlement, "the first community of free blacks in St. Joseph County," in the 1850s.