Indiana black farming community a Smithsonian surprise

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) - Slavery, Jim Crow, civil rights, jazz -- these are the traditional touch points of African-American history.

But at the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, a modest exhibit devoted to a small farming community in southern Indiana has generated buzz.

The exhibit's two dozen or so objects -- including a horse-drawn plow, a hand-held corn planter and a quilt -- are artifacts from an unincorporated burg called Lyles Station. There, free blacks settled, cleared the land and worked their own soil prior to the Civil War, a remarkable feat considering slavery was still the law of the land in half the country, including in Kentucky just 35 miles to the south.

That such a place would have existed has been a surprise to some museumgoers. "There has been very little study of African-American land-owning pioneering farmers in the antebellum period," says Anna-Lisa Cox, a fellow at Harvard University whose research was used in developing the Lyles Station exhibit.

Lyles Station was one of dozens of free black farm communities in the Midwest, which in the early 19th century was still referred to as the "Northwest Territory," the region's official name before it was carved into states.

Its settlers were indomitable people who endured not only the Fugitive Slave Act and other race-based indignities but also continual flooding. The land they acquired was low-lying and near three major rivers.

"The old men were smart men, and they taught us the land was important," says Stanley Madison, a Lyles Station resident who founded the Lyles Station Historic Preservation Corp. in 1997. Madison works his fields less than a mile from where his great-great-grandfather worked his.

That's the other remarkable thing about Lyles Station: It still exists. It's one of the last mid-1800s black farming communities still going.

There were a million black farmers in the USA in 1920, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture report, but by 1982 there were just 30,000. The political climate for black farmers improved in 2010 following President Barack Obama's announcement that $1.25 billion would be made available to fund any unfiled claims from a class-action lawsuit settled in 1997. The lawsuit, filed on behalf of 400 black farmers, alleged that the USDA had denied them loans based on racial discrimination.

In 2012, the USDA counted 44,629 black farmers, a 12% increase since 2007. Even so, blacks make up just 2% of the country's farmers compared with 14% a century ago.

The farmers of Lyles Station "did not take part" in the USDA settlement, Madison says. "There was some talk of it, but no one I know received money from the settlement."

Lyles Station's farmers survived by being enterprising and frugal. "It was always told to us that if you made five dollars, you could spend two but save three," Madison says, "because in farming, you don't know the future, you don't know what could come up."

In 1913, a giant flood came up. It drenched Lyles Station's fields and ruined crops. After that the population, once 800 strong, began to scatter. About 100 residents remain.

The Madisons stayed and prospered by doing things like this: Stanley Madison was in the seventh grade when his grandfather gave him a gilt, a young female pig that could be bred to have many litters of piglets. "My grandfather said, 'Son, if you take care of this animal it'll make you money,'" Stanley Madison recalls. "And by the time I got married, I had the 20% down payment I needed for my house. All from that pig."

The community's farming future is uncertain. In a time of large-scale farming done by corporations, the farms of Lyles Station remain small, most of them in the 150- to 200-acre range, not enough to support a family.

Most of the farmers are part-timers, hobbyists, who rely on 40-hour-a-week jobs in nearby factories for their living. A half-dozen families still own 1,000-acre tracts. But in at least two cases the descendants have moved away and are renting their land to corporate interests.

The future may be cloudy, but with the new museum, at least Lyles Station's past is secure.

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Source: Indianapolis Star, http://indy.st/2md7lwo

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Information from: The Indianapolis Star, http://www.indystar.com