In Indiana, The Last Remnants Of America's Free African-American Settlements
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
The Power Of Place is an exhibit in the new Smithsonian's National Museum of African-American History and Culture that opens on Saturday. It shows the African-American experience in 10 regions across the country. Lyles Station, Ind., is one of those places. It's been a little-known farming community for free blacks since the early 1800s. NPR's Cheryl Corley takes us there.
CHERYL CORLEY, BYLINE: Seventy-nine-year-old Norman Greer stands on the front porch of his home, looking out at his property. His crops include rows of corn and soybeans.
NORMAN GREER: Right here where I live, I own - this is 52 acres right here. And I farm around 300 acres right now. I used to raise a lot of hogs and cattle, and I don't do that anymore. I done got too old to fool with it.
GREER: Walking the land with her father, Denise Greer Jamerson says growing up, she and her sisters took care of the animals.
DENISE GREER JAMERSON: We had some chickens. And if you see the fences, that's where the other pigs would be.
CORLEY: Norman Greer bought this property in Lyles Station for himself in the 1960s. But there's a long history of the Greers owning land here. The farmland his grandfather bought in 1855 is among the oldest in the community. The area, settled by blacks in the 1800s, sits near the southern border of Indiana. And Smithsonian curator Paul Gardullo says it was part of a whole movement of black settlements in what was then the country's Northwest.
PAUL GARDULLO: The old Northwest was chartered as a free territory, so there was no slavery. And so you can imagine that there was a desire to move there on the part of not just white Americans but certainly African-Americans as well.
CORLEY: These were not sharecroppers - some were former slaves, others long free, buying land. And land in the 19th century meant power, as it does today.
STANLEY MADISON: "From here all the way to the Wabash, the biggest portion of this land was owned by blacks.
CORLEY: Stanley Madison is the head of the local organization set up to preserve Lyles Station history and a restored school house that's now a heritage learning center. He uses a map from the 1800s to describe the black farming community's geography.
MADISON: The largest piece of ground here would've been owned by Joshua Lyles - 1,040 acres. That was unheard of for an African-American to own that type of land.
CORLEY: When Joshua Lyles, the town's namesake, donated some of that land to establish a rail station, it helped the settlers sell and export crops. Lyles Station thrived from the late 1880s to the early years of the 20th century. There was a post office, two churches, two general stores, a lumber mill and a school.
Its decline began in 1913, when a devastating flood left most of the town underwater. Later, the railroad would end its passenger service, and racist laws and practices would make life tough. Norman Greer says, as a black farmer, he couldn't get a loan anywhere in the region. Greer says he had to go out of state. Today, there are very few homes in Lyles Station and about 10 black families. That's made Denise Jamerson Greer (ph) fear that the farming ways of her father and Lyles Station are just about over.
JAMERSON: It's going to be a thing of the past, you know, the way that he farmed. 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 and the - but people don't know that exists. Our people don't know that exists. And I think it's a very important piece of how we survived.
CORLEY: The National African-American Museum took hundreds of items to illustrate life in Lyles Station - photographs, the plow that Joshua Lyles used, a quilt and a mason jar full of soil from the 1855 Greer farm.
Cheryl Corley, NPR News.
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