Freedmen's Towns and Enslaved/ADOS influenced settlements

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Lyles Station, Indiana

Lyles or Lyles Station is an unincorporated community in Patoka Township, Gibson County, Indiana. The community dates from 1849, although its early settlers first arrived in the 1830s, and it was formally named Lyles Station in 1886 to honor Joshua Lyles, a free African American who migrated with his family from Tennessee to Indiana around 1837. Lyles Station is one of Indiana's early black rural settlements and the only one remaining. The rural settlement reached its peak in the years between 1880 and 1912, when major structures in the community included the railroad depot, a post office, a lumber mill, two general stores, two churches, and a school. By the turn of the twentieth century, Lyles Station had fifty-five homes, with a population of more than 800 people. The farming community never fully recovered from the Great Flood of 1913, which destroyed much of the town. Most of its residents left for economic reasons, seeking opportunities for higher paying jobs and additional education in larger cities. By 1997 approximately fifteen families remained at Lyles Station, nearly all of them descended from the original settlers.

Although most of Indiana's black rural settlements no longer exist as self-contained communities, Lyles Station continues. The restored Lyles Consolidated School building, which serves as a local living history museum and a community center, and the Wayman Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, are two remaining points of interest in Lyles Station.

The "Power of Place" exhibition in theSmithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., which opened in 2016, features Lyles Station as part of its exhibition on black rural communities in the Midwest.[3] The exhibit includes hundreds of items from the Lyles Station area, including a horse-drawn plow used by Joshua Lyles, clothing, a quilt, and soil from the Greer family farm which has been farmed by the Greer family for over 150 years. [4]

The Greer property is in Lyles Station, a little-known farming community in Indiana where free African-Americans began buying land in the 1800s. The hundreds of acres of farmland Greer's grandfather bought in 1855 is among the oldest in the community.

Beginning Saturday, Lyles Station will be one of the regions featured in the "Power of Place" exhibition when the Smithsonian opens its National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

The museum collected hundreds of items to illustrate life in Lyles Station, including the plow that founder Joshua Lyles used and a Mason jar full of soil from the farm.

Smithsonian curator Paul Gardullo says areas like Lyles Station were part of a broader wave of black settlements in what was then the country's northwest.

"These communities were born in freedom," Lyles says. "The old Northwest was chartered as a free territory and there was no slavery. So you can imagine the desire to move there on the part of not just white Americans, but certainly African-Americans as well."

The people buying land were former slaves and others who had long been free. In the 1840s, Joshua and Sanford Lyles traveled from Tennessee to purchase land. It's a story that Stanley Madison knows well. He's the chairman of the Lyles Station Historic Preservation Corporation and is also a farmer.

In the restored Lyles Consolidated School, a house that's now a heritage learning center, Madison uses a map from the 1800s to describe the black farming community's geography.

"The largest piece of ground here would have been owned by Joshua Lyles; 1,040 acres," Madison says. "That was unheard of for an African-American to own that type of land."

Joshua Lyles donated some of that land to establish a rail station, which helped him and the other settlers sell and export the crops they grew. From the late 1880s to the early years of the 20th century, Lyles Station flourished.

"You would have saw 800 residents around here," Madison says. There was a post office, two churches, two general stores, a lumber mill and a school.

The decline of Lyles Station began in 1913 when a devastating flood left most of the town under water. Later, the railroad would end its passenger service, and racist laws and practices would make life tough for everybody. Norman Greer says he couldn't get a loan anywhere in the region. Instead, he had to go out of state.

Today, there are very few homes in Lyles Station and about 10 black families, mostly descendants from the original settlers. In addition to the scattered houses, the Wayman African Methodist Episcopal Church, a grain elevator and the school house — all saved from ruin — still stand.

There's a sense of pride in the hearts of the people trying to keep the history of the town alive, but Denise Greer Jamerson, Norman's daughter, says she fears that the farming ways of her father and Lyles Station are just about over.

"It's going to be a thing of the past; the way that he farmed," she says. "Down here he was huge. As a kid it would excite me at night to see them coming home from the field with two or three trucks with lights on. ... But people don't know that exists, and I think it's an important piece of how we survived."

In Indiana, The Last Remnants Of America's Free African-American Settlements

 

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Kendleton, TX
Kendleton, Texas - Wikipedia

Peyton Colony, TX
PEYTON, TX (BLANCO COUNTY) | The Handbook of Texas Online| Texas State Historical Association (TSHA)

 

[Neuromancer]

I live south of here.

 

[HarlemHottie]

I live south of here.

I got an alert that you quoted me but i don't see nothing. This is the second time it happened.

Edit, oh you meant Weeksville? I was actually planning a visit. I'm moving to Bk soon and my man has deep connections to the area.

 

[Neuromancer]

I got an alert that you quoted me but i don't see nothing. This is the second time it happened.

Edit, oh you meant Weeksville? I was actually planning a visit. I'm moving to Bk soon and my man has deep connections to the area.

I've only ever been past. Your man from BK?

Really weird cause I quoted you but it's not
There any more.

 

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Salute for the thread @Citi Trends. I had a similar idea to make a thread dedicated to historical black towns and neighborhoods.



Oh I'm bout to have fun with this one.

Northisde of 3rd ward Houston


https://www.math.uh.edu/champ/images/Wilson.pdf


Third Ward, Houston - Wikipedia

Emancipation Park, 3rd ward


Emancipation Park (Houston) - Wikipedia

^^^^^Sad story with a happy ending.

 

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Independence Heights Houston


Independence Heights, Houston - Wikipedia

First black independent incorporated city to be granted a charter into a municipality in Texas. It was first built by black contractors of Wright Land Company who would later go on to sell the land to black people.



Today most residents know the area as 'studewood'.

 

[Whogivesafuck]

Little Egypt, Texas - Wikipedia

 

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Civil war contraband camp turned freedmen's settlement.
Mitchelville - Wikipedia

 

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George Bush (1779 – April 5, 1863)

The Bushes and the other five families established a settlement, named Bush Prairie, at the southernmost tip of Puget Sound in what is now Tumwater, Washington (46°59′39″N 122°55′26″W[13]). (Tumwater's official history has been "white washed" giving almost all the credit for its founding to Simmons and the other white settlers; and mentions only in passing one of the main founding fathers of Tumwater, George Bush) Bush and Michael Simmons built the area's first gristmill and sawmill in 1845, and Bush helped finance Simmons' logging company. Bush introduced the first mower and reaper to the area in 1856.[14]

In addition to their farm, the Bushes ran a roadside hotel for free. Wayfarers traveling between Cowlitz Landing and Puget Sound liked to stop there. It was open to anyone who came through the area. The Bushes would give visitors a good square meal and gave gifts of grain and fruit grown on the Bush farm.[12]

The Oregon Treaty of 1846 ended the joint administration north of the Columbia, placing Bush Prairie firmly in the United States. By staking an American claim to the area, Bush and his party had also brought Oregon's black American exclusion laws, clouding the title to their land; these laws would not have applied if the territory were under the British Empire. When the Washington Territory was formed in 1853, one of the first actions of the Territorial Legislature in Olympia was to ask Congress to give the Bushes unambiguous ownership of their land, which it did in 1855.[1][9] Bush was thus among the very first African-American landowners in Washington State.

According to the Oregon Trail History Library,

The Bush-Simmons Party is credited by some historians as having been in large part responsible for bringing the land north of the Columbia River—the present-day state of Washington—into the United States. They established a presence that attracted other settlers and strengthened the American claim to the area in later debates between Great Britain and the United States over partitioning the Oregon Country.[15]

George Bush lived out the rest of his life in Washington. He maintained excellent relations with local Amerindians, many of whom he nursed through epidemics of measles and smallpox. He also extended remarkable generosity towards his fellow settlers, sharing grain with needy neighbors rather than selling it to speculators at great personal profit.[1] One year, wheat was in short supply and Bush was offered an unheard-of price for his entire crop. His response was

"I'll just keep my grain to let my neighbors who have had failures have enough to live on and for seeding their fields in the spring. They have no money to pay your fancy prices and I don't intend to see them want for anything in my power to provide them with."[16]

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George Washington (August 15, 1817 – August 26, 1905)

was the founder of the town of Centralia, Washington.[1] He is remembered as a leading African American pioneer of the Pacific Northwest.[2]

 

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South Jersey contained many stops along the Underground Railroad, a series of safehouses, safe spaces and secret routes, that aided fugitive enslaved people in their efforts to escape to the North. Famed Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman used some of these routes. These communities provided opportunities for escaped slaves from some of the southern states to settle with other free Blacks, but sometimes the stays were not meant to be permanent.

This is a map of African American settlements in New Jersey. It shows some of the South Jersey locations, including Timbuctoo, Springtown, Colemantown, Lawnside, Gouldtown, Whitesboro and more.