Underground Railroad: African American Landowners

African American Landowners of Lick Creek In the exodus of about 200 Quakers from North Carolina to Indiana in the mid-1800s, a substantial portion of the group were free African Americans. They travelled alongside white Quakers, who although offered a certain degree of protection, did not always provide a welcoming invitation once in Indiana. Despite restricted liberties in Indiana, free Blacks found refuge in the Lick Creek settlement, now part of the Hoosier National Forest.

In 1831, Mathew Thomas became one of the first Black land owners in the Lick Creek area. By that time, 96 African Americans lived in the region. Although Thomas was born free, in 1821 his mother indentured him to Zachariah Lindley, a founding settler of the Lick Creek community from North Carolina.

Upon completion of his service, Thomas purchased eight acres. Two years later he paid the state’s bond of $1,000 to secure his freedom. Other local African Americans followed in Thomas’s footsteps.

In 1832, recent free Black migrants from North Carolina - Benjamin Roberts, David Dugged, and Peter Lindley - purchased forty acres each of land from the United States government. These homesteads became the center of the Lick Creek settlement. By 1840, 10 African Americans owned land totaling 780 acres in the Lick Creek community.

The settlement reached its maximum size in 1855 of over 1,500 acres. The increasing hostility, racial intolerance, and limiting laws imposed by the state supported the need for African Americans to form strong family and communal networks within the settlement. However, after the Civil War African Americans slowly left Lick Creek; by the turn of the twentieth century there were no longer Blacks living in the area.

Sources: Cheryl LaRoche, Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance.