The station claims, tested one by one · what the tradition says, and what carries it

1840 – 1850, as remembered in 1899 and 1939

The claim of an organized South Bend station fails on its earliest carriers: The fullest local telling of the Underground Railroad here is not a document of the 1850s but a memory of them: Esse Bissell Dakin's "The Underground Railroad," printed in the South Bend Daily Tribune of 25 April 1899, built from the reminiscences of participants and their children, and carried forward in Helen Hibberd Windle's The Underground Railroad in Northern Indiana (1939). That tradition — the friendliest possible source for local claims — is itself the chief witness against the largest of them. It reports Siebert's finding that no direct route through South Bend is conclusively evidenced, and corroborates it from its own oldest residents. It tells how the minister who organized stations out of Illinois came to South Bend looking for an agent and passed on, finding the abolitionists here too cautious to incur the penalties of the law — the feeling against them was intense and bitter, and detection would surely follow — and placed his station instead at Bertrand, just over the Michigan line, in the keeping of Mr. King, a shoemaker, and Mr. Adlery, a harnessmaker. No earlier or stronger carrier for a South Bend station exists in the record reached, and the tradition that might have invented one instead reports that there was none. Houses later pointed out in the city as stations stand on no document this record contains; where a claim of that kind is made without a carrier, it is not carried here.

The named supporters, and the tradition's own caveat: What the 1899–1939 tradition does name is a circle. "The residents of the vicinity of South Bend known to have been abolitionists and contributors to the Underground Railroad during the years 1840–1850, inclusive," Windle's compilation lists as Leander B. Newton, Edward B. Crocker, Almond Bugbee, Thomas B. Bulla, William F. Bulla, Eliakim Briggs, Solomon W. Palmer, Amable M. La Pierre, Joseph L. Jernegan, Aaron Webster, and a Mr. Jones near Terre Coupee — followed, in the tradition's own words, by its governing caveat: "Not all of the gentlemen mentioned harbored fugitives or conducted them to places of safety, but they contributed money, and then, as now, the success of any undertaking depended largely upon the amount of money at hand." The list's core is anchored in the court record independently: Newton, Palmer and La Pierre stand among the nine men Norris sued, Crocker and Jernegan stand in the case as the captives' counsel and the defendants' counsel respectively, and Palmer's abolitionism is documented in his own Chapman biography. The tradition around those anchored names is printed here as tradition; the names the court record does not touch — the Bullas, Briggs, Webster, Jones — stand on the reminiscence alone.

The anecdotes, at reminiscence strength: Three specific acts of conveyance survive in the tradition, each with its teller. Solomon Palmer's is told as Palmer's own story: that from his mill ten miles south of the city, in dense woods where fugitives were frequently seen dodging about the underbrush, he once picked up three Black travelers by the roadside, took them home behind locked doors and drawn shades, fed them, and drove them that night to Niles, where La Pierre procured tickets and put them on the train for Detroit and Canada. Aaron Webster's is told as Webster's own relating: that he gave money to the barber Sawyer without telling his young son why, because in a haymow nearby lay a fugitive whose master was at that moment sleeping at the old St. Joe House — the money hired a livery rig, and that night, while his master slept, the man was driven to Niles, put on a passing train, and was free when his master awoke. The third is a child's memory, Thomas H. Bulla's, of an evening about 1856 when a wagon stopped at his father's Clay Township farmhouse with its box covered by a second box inverted over it, two Black men hidden in the space between, and the family filled it with food before it drove on north. These are printed as what they are — named men's memories, written down forty to ninety years after the nights they describe. Nothing in the contemporary record contradicts them, and nothing in it confirms them; the documented Powell case, fought in open court, is the form South Bend's resistance took when it left paper.

The two barbers: The tradition's most specific claim concerns the community's own members. James Washington and a Mr. Sawyer, "two colored barbers" whose shop stood on Washington Street near J. G. Bartlett's grocery and bakery, "were solicitors for the Underground Railroad, and when they silently extended an open palm, its significance was understood and the appeal met with generous response." Almond Bugbee, the tradition says, was one of Washington's most liberal contributors, and Washington told him years afterward of a collection that came, providentially, at the very moment a fugitive family — man, wife and children, hiding in the village — needed food, clothing and conveyance. The earliest carrier of Washington's railroad work reached by this record is the 1899 Tribune gathering; the claim descends in that line to the city's Reparatory Justice Commission of 2026, whose report calls him, in its words, a significant member of the Underground Railroad — the telling of him as a citizen and householder stands in the Black History section. What the contemporary record itself documents is the trade, the shop's street, and the man's standing; the soliciting rests on the reminiscence, and it is printed on that footing.

The claims that are not there: Three absences complete the test. The Huggart Settlement — the free Black settlement Farrow and Rebecca Powell built from their Main Street purchase of 1858, marked by the state in 1998 — is documented as a settlement of free families, and no carrier in the record reached calls it a station or a stop; the label is not in its record, and it is not added here. No claim for Alexis Coquillard's house, for Schuyler Colfax, or for any tunnel or cellar in the city appears anywhere in the published local record searched for this section — not in Chapman, not in Howard, not in the 1899 and 1939 tradition, not in Thornbrough, and not in the state's marker list; if such claims circulate, they enter the record without a carrier in it. And the commemoration record matches the documentary one: of St. Joseph County's twenty-three Indiana state historical markers, none marks a station or the Powell case — the county's antebellum Black marker is Huggart Settlement's (1998) — while the case's modern local tellings have sometimes outrun their sources, as the courthouse entry in the Clio tour guide does in saying that both Norris v. Newton and Norris v. Crocker "ultimately reached the United States Supreme Court": the damages case never left the circuit court; the penalty case, Norris v. Crocker, did, and its text is in the entry above.

Sources:

1. Esse Bissell Dakin, "The Underground Railroad," South Bend Daily Tribune, 25 April 1899, pp. 6–7 — the reminiscence gathering itself, identified and quoted in Claire Harvey, "The South Bend Fugitive Slave Case," Hanover Historical Review (2017), nn. 43–45, and carried forward in Windle (below).
2. Helen Hibberd Windle, The Underground Railroad in Northern Indiana (South Bend, 1939; transcribed by David James, 2009, for the Civil Rights Heritage Center) — read whole and first-hand for this section: Siebert's finding and the Bertrand station; the supporters' list and its caveat; the Palmer, Webster and Bulla anecdotes; Washington and Sawyer; Crocker's house on Washington Street and Jernegan's at the site afterward occupied by Tippecanoe Place, given as the men's residences, not as stations.
3. Chapman, History of St. Joseph County (1880), the defendant list of Norris v. Newton and the Palmer biography — the court-record anchor for the tradition's core names.
4. Indiana Historical Bureau, state historical markers by county and by category — the twenty-three St. Joseph County markers, Huggart Settlement (71.1998.1) among them, and no station or fugitive-case marker in the county.
5. Howard Dukes and George Garner, "St. Joseph County Courthouses and Historic Marker," Clio (2018) — the modern tour telling, including its Supreme Court sentence, corrected above from the reports themselves.