Roberts Settlement: Free Black Pioneers in Indiana

In the spring of eighteen thirty-five, three men from North Carolina arrived in the rolling farmland of Jackson Township, Hamilton County, and began buying land. Hansel, Elijah, and Willis Roberts were not unusual settlers for Indiana, except in one significant way: they were free people of color, most with family roots stretching back to free Black and mixed-heritage communities that had existed in the upper South for generations before the Revolution.

They chose this particular corner of Indiana deliberately. Anti-slavery Quakers had already settled the surrounding townships, and the Roberts and Walden families knew that proximity to Quaker neighbors offered a measure of protection in a state where the legal status of free Black residents was always precarious. In eighteen thirty-one, Nat Turner's rebellion in Virginia had set off a wave of legislation across the South restricting the movement and rights of free Black people. The Roberts family, whose members had been free for generations, read that moment clearly and moved west.

By eighteen thirty-eight the settlement's farmers owned over nine hundred acres. By eighteen forty several related families had joined them: the Brooks, Winburn, Newsom, and Sweat families alongside the Roberts and Waldens. In eighteen forty-seven the community built a school and a church meetinghouse. By eighteen seventy, Roberts Settlement had grown to over two hundred residents and seventeen hundred acres of improved farmland.

The church that stands near the present-day town of Atlanta is Roberts Chapel, built in its current form in eighteen fifty-eight and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen ninety-six. The adjacent cemetery has been an active burial ground since eighteen thirty-one, making it one of the oldest documented African American burial sites in the state.

Roberts Settlement represents something rare in American history: a community of free Black landowners who established themselves before the Civil War, survived the long hostility of the surrounding culture, and left a documented record that allows their story to be told with precision.