The antebellum Black community · counted in the census, named in the record

1840 – 1860

The count: The community that lived under the laws of the next entry was, by the federal census, a small and then a fast-growing one. The census counted nine Black residents of St. Joseph County in 1840 and twenty-nine in 1850 — eighteen of them in South Bend itself, on the city count the Landmark Tour carries. For 1860 the figure is read here from the census volume's own printed tables: the Eighth Census counts eighty-eight free colored residents of St. Joseph County — twenty-nine returned as Black and fifty-nine as Mulatto in the census's own columns, forty-seven men and forty-one women — in a county of 18,455 people, and its nativity table returns every one of the eighty-eight as native-born, none foreign-born. No slave was returned in the county in any of these censuses; Indiana's prohibition held on paper from 1816. The counted series whole — the decades before and after — is the Population section's; what the three antebellum figures say by themselves is that across the decade in which Indiana's constitution ordered Black people not to come, this county's Black community tripled, from twenty-nine to eighty-eight. The 1860 split between the city and the townships is not separately pulled for this section and is named here as a gap in its count rather than estimated.

The names: The households behind the early figures are told in the Black History section and are pointed to, not retold: Peter Coleman, the first permanent Black resident of record, settled in the city in 1839; the Garrett Smith family, the first Black family known to have owned property here, owned in 1849 the first brick home in South Bend; and Farrow Powell and Rebecca Maria (Bass) Powell — no relation to the fugitive family — came in the 1850s, bought on Main Street in 1858, and founded the Huggart Settlement, the first community of free Blacks in the county. To those names this section adds only what its own record carries: the barbers James Washington and Mr. Sawyer, working their trade on Washington Street in the heart of the village in the 1840s and 1850s, Washington a prominent citizen of the era on the Commission's account; and the mass fact of September 1849, when the county's tiny community was joined for one weekend by seventy to two hundred Black neighbors from the Cass County settlement — a reminder that the community's life ran up the road to Michigan as much as it ran inside the county line. Most early residents, on the Commission's reading of the record, worked as farm laborers and general laborers; the barber's chair was the community's skilled and public trade, practiced for Black and white customers alike.

The convention they did not attend, and the church not yet founded: Two negatives close the antebellum community's record at their true size. In Indianapolis on 1–4 August 1851 — the weekend before the state voted on excluding them — Indiana's Black citizens held a state convention in the A.M.E. Church, with delegates credentialed from more than a dozen counties, and resolved to ask amendment of the constitution rather than removal, preferring Canada or Jamaica to Liberia only if the laws became intolerable. No delegate from St. Joseph County appears in the convention's credential roll as its minutes print it; the county's twenty-nine Black residents, the convention's record shows, were not in the room where the state's Black answer was framed. And no Black congregation is documented in the county before the war in any record reached: the community's worship in these decades left no church, class or society in the surviving record, and the first Black church of record here is Olivet A.M.E., organized in 1870 — told in the Black History section, and named here so the gap is not mistaken for an oversight. What survives of the antebellum community is a count that tripled, three households, two barbers, and one weekend when its friends filled a courthouse town. The Commission's judgment on the rest stands: other early residents were certainly here, whose stories have been lost.

Sources:

1. Population of the United States in 1860, compiled from the returns of the Eighth Census (Washington, 1864), State of Indiana, Table No. 2, "Population by Color and Condition," p. 112, and Table No. 4, "Population, Native and Foreign, by Counties," p. 129 — the St. Joseph County row read from the printed pages for this section: white 18,367; free colored, Black 29 and Mulatto 59, total 88; aggregate 18,455; all 88 native-born.
2. City of South Bend, Final Report of the Reparatory Justice Commission (filed 5 March 2026), Part I, and the IU South Bend Civil Rights Heritage Center's African American Landmark Tour — the 1840 and 1850 county counts, the eighteen in South Bend in 1850, Coleman, the Smiths, the Powells of Main Street and the laborers' record, as told in the Black History section and pointed to here.
3. The Minutes of the State Convention of the People of Color of the State of Indiana (Indianapolis, 1851), via the Colored Conventions Project — the credential roll of delegates, sessions of 1–4 August 1851, and the resolutions, read first-hand.
4. Windle (1939) and Dakin (1899), as cited in the preceding entry — Washington and Sawyer and their Washington Street shop.